Amazon Insists Publishers Use Their On-Demand Printer 182
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.'"
Re:Uh OK (Score:5, Informative)
No surprise here (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Amazon is just like all the rest.... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
A good use for POD (Score:3, Informative)
Re:not unreasonable (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.
Yow-- Seems be true.... (Score:3, Informative)
What in the world are they thinking? This seems to be a pretty flagrant abuse of power.
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.
Sturgeon's Law (Score:3, Informative)
The traditional publishers' 90% is usually professionally proofread and edited. Anyone who thinks a major publisher's imprint on a book is a guarantee of quality content really needs to read a lot more.
That said, I'm most likely to go with POD should I publish a book on Linux, and I know an increasing number of writing professionals who are either considering POD or are already personally using it. The people I hear making your argument are people who hope to be published someday.
My first published work was back in 1987. My next published work will be a how-to piece on configuring apt, it'll be on Informit [informit.com] in a month or so.
Upside of POD? Control of content, much higher profit per book, and control over how the book is publicized and marketed. If you actually want to sell a POD book, build your own website and promote it using the POD site as a back end to take orders, don't depend on potential readers finding your book among the thousands published on their site. And spend the extra money to buy a package including an ISBN so they can be ordered through brick-and-mortar bookstores.
Downside: No megacorporate budget to buy shelf space, but unless you're already "A" list, you aren't going to get much help from your publisher anyway. If you want a book professionally edited, find a good editor and prepare for sticker shock when you get the hourly rate and time estimate.
Remember that for a professional writer, the point behind writing is profit. You might be able to make more with 10K book sales via POD than 100K book sales via a mainstream publisher. And that very few mainstream published books earn out their advances.
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.
Barnes and Noble (Score:3, Informative)
I've been a loyal amazon shopper for years. No longer. They're leveraging their market share to prevent sales of thousands of books because they want a bigger cut, and rather than just wanting a bigger cut (which would be easy to get in many cases, if they refused to sell books with a "short discount"), they they want to do the printing and get paid ridiculously high amounts for it.
It has been the golden age of printing for a little while, now, when it was relatively cheap and easy to publish, and the gatekeepers of the market weren't the only way to go to press. Sure, it meant you could order a lot of junk if you wanted to--but you could also order a lot of Indie stuff, and a lot of things that didn't seem like they'd sell a million copies. The profit margins on book publication are low, especially for the time and work that goes into writing a decent book in the first place--the opportunity cost really makes the profit margins negative in most cases. For hundreds and hundreds of small presses, this lowers them further.
Buy at Barnes and Noble, or special-order through your local bookseller.
"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
amazon and "pseudostock" explained (Score:2, Informative)
"Customer A" orders a copy regardless, and you immediately send their copy to amazon. The amazon system then registers that copy as "in stock", and sits on it for four to six weeks, on the assumption that the customer doesn't need to have it before then. During this time, amazon get to show the book as available from stock (next day delivery available). This makes it easier for them to get further sales.
After a week "Customer B" comes along, sees that the book is in stock at amazon, and buys a copy. Amazon then immediately send "Customer B" the copy that was originally ordered in for Customer A, with next day delivery as promised, and reorders another copy from you, for "A". You dutifully send the second copy to amazon immediately. Their system looks at the existing order, realises that it still doesn't have to be supplied for several weeks, and flags it again as as available stock. After another week they sell the second copy to "customer C", who's again seen it marked as in stock and available for immediate delivery.
So poor old Customer A gets screwed, because they ordered the book when it had a long quoted lead-time, and that quoted lead-time gets attached to their order - amazon treats their copy as unallocated and hangs onto it until the last possible moment, and all the successive customers, who are quoted a short lead time, get to leapfrog A's order. A's order is treated as "pseudostock" and only gets sent to A at the last possible moment ... assuming that it hasn't just been sold again to someone else.
From amazon's point of view it means that everyone gets sent the book within the promised timeframe (unless A is especially unlucky, which can happen), and amazon get to "stock" the book at zero risk, because their "stock" is guaranteed pre-sold. ... point of view, amazon are giving a good service, keeping the book in stock and supplying it promptly.
From B, C, D's
From A's point of view, they don't understand why their mates who ordered the same book after them get sent copies by amazon after a few days, while their copy, which was ordered first, takes two months to arrive.
It's just amazon's clever stock allocation system at work, sometimes it's just a little bit too clever for its own good.