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Amazon Insists Publishers Use Their On-Demand Printer
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Mar 29, 2008 10:15 PM
from the why-that's-blackmail dept.
from the why-that's-blackmail dept.
Lawrence Person writes "According to a story up on Writer's Weekly, Print on Demand publishers are being told to use Amazon's own BookSurge POD printer or else Amazon will disable the 'buy' button for their books. After hemming and hawing, an Amazon/BookSurge rep 'finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the "buy" button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we'd heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives... their eventual desire is to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.' So much for Amazon's Vision Statement: 'Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.'"
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POD Braces Itself Against Amazon 69 comments
OMNIpotusCOM writes "As we've previously discussed, Amazon is in the process of taking the 'Buy' buttons off of published on demand (POD) books that were not created by Amazon's in-house publisher, BookSurge. PODdy Mouth has been reporting reactions throughout the week (including an open letter from Amazon), culminating today in letters to Amazon and their board by the Author's Guild, Small Publishers Association of North America, and the Publishers Marketing Association. Possible lawsuits are looming ... is it enough to change Amazon's mind?"
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Amazon is just like all the rest.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wrote a sci-fi novel [moon-age-daydream.com] last year and we published it hardback with our own press.
What's the difference between that and POD? Pretty much everything. We registered a business, raised capital, had everything professionally laid out, cover designed, then offset printed in a large quantity and warehoused them with a real distributor (that can deal with Ingram and hence the rest of the world, including Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc.). This will net you a quality book!
POD, on the other hand is about a big company milking newbie authors of their dreams and pumping out inferior (even "crappy") products.
I stand by the quality of my book as an independent publisher. I guarantee its quality, that's why it is *returnable.*
In POD things aren't returnable which is why retail outlets stay away from them.
Amazon just wants to milk the little guy like all the other POD companies. They don't mind pushing out the other POD books because they know they don't sell for beans anyway! That's why Amazon will make their money off the authors like the other PODs, but since the only major outlet that will even touch POD books is Amazon, it means most POD authors will now flock to Amazon's POD since who else will carry their book?
It's pretty genius, if ruthless, if you ask me.
*iza
Choice is Good, OK? (Score:5, Interesting)
Regular publishing might have worked well for you but it won't for everyone. Sometimes a book's contents are more important than the presentation and that's where POD is good. The inconvenience of it all is why print is dying.
This ruthless genius of yours is making Amazon suck. I could almost forgive them for the one-click-patent fiasco because they had a real range of goods to chose from. Yes, I'm still angry at them for making shopping everywhere else suck. Then they opted for that second rate search service two years ago [news.com]. The one that immediately locked out smaller vendors in favor of bigger ones. Not being able to find specialty items drove me right back to ebay and Google itself. The trend continues and Amazon continues down the tube.
If I want a limited choice of goods I'll go to the local brick and mortar store. Amazon used to offer better than that.
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Re:Amazon is just like all the rest.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Why would you use a traditional publisher anyway? (Score:4, Interesting)
You seem to have this wonderful illusion that going via a real publisher is some sort of guarantee of decent quality. It certainly isn't in programming books: take a look at some more recent titles by Addison-Wesley, previously the source of the majority of good C++ books, and it's hard not to find typos all over the place, amateurish design and typography, and a general lack of editorial quality. Several other professional publishers were never much better than that. And if you think going for a reputable university press would be better than the big professional outfits, guess again: take a look at the guidelines for authors published by some of them (you can often find these on their web sites) and they tend to insist on petty things like conforming to some arbitrary (or sometimes, IMHO, outright incorrect) house styles that do nothing to improve the quality of a work written by a skilled and knowledgable author, before they'll even grace you with the benefits of their immense knowledge and experience (and yes, that was sarcasm: do you realise who these "professional editors" typically are?).
Not so long ago, I considered writing a book, after receiving some favourable comments on a couple of smaller pieces of work I'd done. I looked into what would be involved in going through a mainstream publisher, and came away asking why anyone with decent writing ability and decent knowledge of the presentation side of things would ever use one. I always knew authors didn't normally receive a high percentage of the cover price of a book, but I was shocked at just how little it really is: well under 10% seems pretty typical, and it varies depending on the market. Anyone with some basic knowledge of subjects like book layout and typography could produce a better design than many of the "professionals" do without even trying, using any good DTP package (or even LaTeX, for technical books). I have some contacts at some university publishers, and some of the comments I hear about their editorial teams are just appalling. And it's not even like being published by a reputable press will get you into bricks and mortar stores any more: if I walk into my local Borders, it's full of "computing for fools" and "learn computing in ten seconds" books, but even relatively mainstream "serious" books are in short supply these days and I usually have to look on-line for them. There are almost no more specialised books of the kind you'd typically find from an academic press.
So, if people are going to have to order in or buy from the big on-line vendors to get any serious technical book, and publishers add precious little value in the editorial and presentation departments if you're likely to be as competent as their staff anyway, what real advantage do they bring? You can jump through a few hoops to get things like an ISBN and use a reputable POD organisation with links to a major distribution channel, and then you can have exactly the book you want available through all the same (realistic) channels anyway, but with at least 10x the profit margin on every book sold and with almost no financial liability if your book doesn't sell. Do professional publishers really produce and market books well enough to get an order of magnitude more sales for specialist titles than the self-publishing/POD route? Not if the data from people like O'Reilly and the anecdotes from published authors on the web are anything to go by, they don't.
And of course, just because you're self-publishing, that doesn't mean your quality has to suck. You might be a decent writer and designer yourself, compared to what you'd get from a typical publisher, and you can still bring in professional help for areas where you need it if you're not an expert. It's just done on your terms, with costs you know, and once you've paid your overheads you don't have to keep paying for them with every new book sold.
So tell me again, why would anyone with decent writing and presentation skills go to a professional publisher today, if they aren't writing the kind of mass-market fiction or technical books for idiots that are likely to sell with a really high volume and make it into real world bookshops?
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Re:Amazon is just like all the rest.... (Score:5, Informative)
You're conflating POD with self-publishing. Lots of big, established publishers use POD as one of their methods of production. It's not uncommon these days for a publisher to keep a novel in print in paperback by producing 300 units at a time via someone like Lightningsource.
I'll agree with you that self-publishing is full of scams. But: "This will net you a quality book!" Well, when you're talking about "quality" with respect to a novel, the big issues aren't layout and cover design, the real issue is whether the writing is any good. That has nothing to do with methods of production and everything to do with editorial standards.
Self-publishing can be fine, as long as you go into it with realistic expectations -- i.e., you don't expect to make any money. AFAICT, 99% of self-published books don't reach an audience. The other 1% reach an audience, but aren't profitable.
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Re:Amazon is just like all the rest.... (Score:5, Informative)
Self published can mean a lot more money (there are webcomic authors who make a living partly off of self published books). But you get into risks and predatory companies.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I work in the book industry, science buyer for a large branch of a national bookstore specialising in academic titles. A very big chunk of my job is promoting my subject locally, I'm in touch with local organisations, universities and clubs. I am heavily involved in a national science festival at the moment, supplying books for events where the authors give a public lecture on, say, cosmology, and then sign a few books and have a chat. I'm making sure that we have a
Uh OK (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uh OK (Score:5, Informative)
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"use our printing co. or we won't sell your books" (Score:5, Informative)
That argument might work if amazon were just targeting the small POD companies. In fact, they seem to be targeting some of the customers of the largest POD company, Ingram LSI.
Ingram are a major book distributor, and LSI can supply any of about half a million books straight into the distribution chain to both "bricks and mortar" bookshops and to online sellers like amazon. This massive catalogue includes large numbers of specialist academic titles from university publishers. The customers buying these books will often have no idea that they're being printed on POD technology rather than litho. In fact, if you buy an individual POD book through amazon, and it's printed by one of the larger printer/distributors like LSI, amazon may not actually ever see the book themselves. Their computers pass on the order and the payment to LSI, and LSI package it up in a nice amazon box and send it directly to the customer. With POD printing/distribution, not only do the nominal publishers not have to worry about warehousing and handling stock, neither do the online booksellers. It's a good system, that puts some of the more traditional distribution systems to shame. Laser-printed POD-technology books work out significantly more expensive per page than litho printing, so for "popular" titles, litho is still the way to go ... but for the established academic presses that might have tens of thousands of "niche" books in their catalogues, migrating them to POD makes a lot of sense.
At this point in the story, almost everything in the garden looks happy. LSI are the largest most integrated supplier but have fixed printing options that don't please everyone: smaller specialist POD companies take up the slack for more specialist POD print jobs that require more human intervention: unusual sizes or cover options, foldouts, inserts, prestige paper, special inks, that sort of thing. Vanity publishers and print-your-own-book services run their own in-house POD printing plant rather than subcontracting, to keep the business in-house, as do certain other speciality publishers. Each has their own niche.
Where the business shakedown started to happen was with the larger independent POD/distribution startup companies that didn't have the niche business of the smaller companies, and couldn't compete with the slickly integrated production service offered by LSI (whose parent company, Ingrams, is one of the most important book industry corporations). One of these companies, "BookSurge", was ambitious, and had the print plant, but had trouble actually getting companies to sign up with them. What they offered wasn't as good as the larger LSI, or the smaller specialist companies. There was no obvious niche for them. So amazon saw an opportunity and bought them out.
And now amazon run their own print-on demand service built around BookSurge.
Snag is, it's not really all that good. It can't offer the flexibility or customer-friendly service of the smaller POD companies, and it can't achieve economies of scale or better integration than LSI, because LSI already take orders directly from the Amazon systems and ship direct. So amazon don't get any additional "process efficiency" by having books printed by their own POD company rather than LSI. What they do get is an extra share of the profits from being the printer and distributor as well as the seller.
Trouble is, that argument only works if their printer-distributor company actually //makes// money, and while Booksurge has had great publicity, it turns out that it doesn't actually seem to offer a sufficiently compelling service for enough people to want to sign up for it. Even with the amazon name behind them, they simply aren't sufficiently competitive.
And so, we have this new development that BookSurge sales reps have started making up lists of
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Soapboxing (Score:3, Insightful)
No surprise here (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No surprise here (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:No surprise here (Score:4, Insightful)
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not unreasonable (Score:3, Informative)
This is not entirely unreasonable. POD operations aimed at self-publishers tend to be flaky and unreliable about issues like quality control, packaging, and promptness in filling orders. Since most self-published books sell only a microscopic number of copies, I suspect Amazon is simply doing this as a way to stay away from business that creates lots of hassles and no significant profit.
TFA refers to PublishAmerica [wikipedia.org], which is an infamous author mill. I'm not crying any tears for them.
I've self-published some CC-licensed physics textbooks, and I've been reasonably happy with lulu, whose CEO was one of the founders of Red Hat. However, I think most of the people who buy one of lulu's distribution packages probably end up being sorry they did it, because it's just not typically realistic to hope for significant sales of a self-published book through the big retail channels. I just use their free package, where customers order directly from lulu. It's worked great for my needs: noncommercial project, with college bookstores as the customers.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's worth noting that Booksurge does not have a free option; their minimum upfront charge is $299, and they're quite keen on pushing their more expensive packages.
Bad, bad PR move by Amazon.
Re:not unreasonable (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. Don't confuse POD with vanity publishing. It is possible to directly self-publish a book through a major distributor without a fluffy middleman, My book www.essentialretro.com and hundreds of thousands of others are published on demand through Lightning Source, a division of Ingram (one of the largest book distributors). It costs a mere $12 a year to list in the Ingram catalog (which gets my book onto Amazon) and I earn around 35% of each book sold, with the rest going to pay LSI for printing and fulfilling the book and Amazon for selling it. Amazon maintains a small inventory of my book to ensure that it's available to ship "within 24 hours" and they automatically order more from LSI when they run low. The system works very well and I don't have to do anything to keep my book in print.
Amazon's standard percentage for each sale is a whopping 45% (I've specified a "short discount" of only 35%, which they somewhat grudgingly accept). I investigated Booksurge in the past, and it has several significant shortcomings. First, it would result in me earning about 10% less per book sold, they offer a smaller number of trim sizes and distribution through normal channels is nowhere near as comprehensive as Ingram/LSI (who allow my book to be special ordered at nearly all bookshops). Personally, I'll start directing traffic to an Amazon competitor instead - Barnes & Noble offer me the same terms. Amazon can go take their proprietary system and get stuffed.
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A good use for POD (Score:3, Informative)
Amazon holds a lot of power over publishers (Score:4, Insightful)
Additionally Amazon (like Walmart with RFID) can push other demands, such as conforming to their barcode standards, and shipping by their standards, or refusing to pay.
It's really quite crazy, I wish more people were aware of this.
Yow-- Seems be true.... (Score:3, Informative)
What in the world are they thinking? This seems to be a pretty flagrant abuse of power.
Chilling (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this move by Amazon to be disturbing. Are they a distributor or manufacturer? Until recently, Amazon was simply a retail hub for nearly any product I might be looking for and they were happy to sell it to me. I could search for the best product and know that Amazon was a reasonable place to look for a good price with quick delivery and great service. I was so confident that I would be spending money with them that I gladly paid the Amazon Prime pre-paid shipping and have saved money each year since that program began because of it.
Now there appears to be a shift: Amazon has produced the Kindle and now are, in essence, the publisher of at least 100K titles. They also produce the reader, the Kindle itself. They now have a competitive stake where they were previously just "honest brokers." What happens when two years from now an electronic book system comes out that blows the Kindle away? Does Amazon shun it? Do they do more? Must we now expect Microsoft-like tactics for any technology competitor to the products that Amazon develops or acquires? It isn't just that something might not appear in the Amazon store; I now worry that more active anticompetitive actions may be in the offing now that Amazon has begun down this path.
We recognize when Walmart, the nation's largest retailer, throws their weight around. That makes the evening news occasionally. Our view of Amazon to this point has been only through their web site, stock price, and that little box that arrives occasionally. I fear we may be seeing more of Amazon than that--and it isn't a good thing.
Re:Chilling (Score:5, Informative)
Our automotive engineering textbooks are published by a small press and the first book has been in print continuously since 1995. The other two books are somewhat more recent. All remain in print and sell between 300 and 1500 copies/year. Typical press runs are 2000-3000 copies at a time. Our publisher has their own warehouse which stocks books and sells direct (web/phone/mail order) as well as quantity sales to wholesalers (worldwide) and college book stores.
On several occasions, our publisher has not accepted Amazon's draconian terms[1] and in response (retaliation??), Amazon has listed our books in various ways such as: as "out of print", "possibly out of print", "out of stock", "special order only" or "availability 6-8 weeks".
This has a chilling effect on potential customers. For example, I've received multiple emails through our company website (where we have a page on the books) asking if we might still have a copy for sale. After all, Amazon carries *every* book, right? So if Amazon says it's "out of print" that must be true, eh? Pure BS from Amazon.
Amazon is also the lowest price source, right? Not true, the price on Amazon has been both higher and lower than the direct list price from our publisher.
I just checked to see what they are up to now. Amazon lists our first book (best selling of the three) as follows:
"(Title) (Hardcover - Nov 1997) Buy new: $149.95 Not in stock; order now and we'll deliver when available"
Our publisher's list price for this book is $99.95 and they ship same day if you order in the morning. Our other books are also listed on Amazon at prices above publisher's list price.
I've also had emails from a number of people that have bought our books and report extremely bad service from Amazon, for example, delivery times of two months are common. I suspect that Amazon sits on orders and waits until there are enough from one specialty publisher to attempt to strong-arm the small publisher into a low price.
When I want to order a book from a small press, I order directly from the source. It might cost a few bucks more (yes, I'm in USA) but I choose to support small publishers this way.
[1] The terms that I heard were that Amazon would only pay 40% of the list price (60% discount) and also insisted that our publisher would cover the cost of any unsold books that Amazon chose to return.
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Alternatives? (Score:4, Insightful)
If Amazon's being evil, I'm willing to take my business elsewhere.
If Amazon's the only online bookseller who's willing to touch this stuff, then perhaps it's time for the POD industry to stop and take a long, hard look at itself.
I really don't know which is true. The article is terribly one-sided, and I'm sure that if Amazon responds, their response will be equally one-sided. So, let's see the alternatives.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
American manufacturers have shipped jobs and technology overseas.
Which greedy people promptly buy in droves because it's not cheaper without even as much as glancing at where or who made it.
The car companies made giant cars knowing full well that they wasted energy and contributed to global warming.
Which greedy people promptly buy in droves despite other choices existing as well in the market.
Now we have a whole economic sector in crisis due to making loans that people couldn't pay and it is spilling into the rest of the economy.
Which were loans that greedy people took out because they wanted to buy more ex
Fucking Greed: the important part (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have any book stores or music stores left in my town as of this week. I'm not blaming Amazon and Apple. I blame my neighbors.
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