Amazon issued a statement this morning saying the loss of buy buttons for e-books from a number of major houses was the result of a "technical issue" in the Kindle store and that all buttons have been restored.
During the evening of November 8, buttons from a number of publishers' Kindle titles, including Hachette, Random House, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and HarperCollins, were unavailable. Unaffected were HMH, W.W. Norton, Harlequin, and Scholastic, among others. The buttons were down for several hours, during which 50 of Amazon's top 100 Kindle titles were unavailable. Amazon offered no further details about what the technical issue was and why it appeared only the buy buttons from the big six houses were affected leading to a host of theories on the Internet about why and how such an issue could occur.
