Why did Amazon turn off buy buttons on Big 6 ebooks last night?

Last night, while the world was rushing to buy Mr. Popular Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise," Amazon's "buy" buttons for all Big 6 publishers experienced a brief "technical issue."

Laura Hazard Owen over at PaidContent has a great account of the atrocities, providing some context for Amazon's disappearing buttons. —Brian Howard

Quoth LHO: "The most notorious case of Amazon purposely turning off a publisher’s ebook buy buttons happened in January 2010, when the company turned off Macmillan’s Kindle buy buttons to protest the publisher’s implementation of agency pricing."