Amazon Insists Publishers Use Their On-Demand Printer

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.'"

Uh OK

[Brian Gordon]

It seems like it would require significant work to set up a line to and account with every print-on-demand service an author cares to use.. why would Amazon jump through hoops to accomodate competitors? This seems like a very specialized situation that Amazon should have plenty of free reign to work with however they'd like.. I think it's surprising that they were even accomodating print-on-demand services in the first place.

Soapboxing

[Improv]

Customer-friendliness and vendor-friendliness are not the same thing. It may be fine to complain about this (details about "why?" and "what effects will it have" are open questions), but saying that it violates their stated goal to be customer-friendly is, at least, underjustified.

Re:No surprise here

[webmaster404]

Or acquire others more legitimately via http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page [gutenberg.org] .

Re:Soapboxing

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of being customer friendly is offering as wide a variety of choices as possible. Refusing to carry something based on a tactic to lock in a different part of the market is not customer friendly.

Let's suppose book X is printed-on-demand by a non-Amazon publisher. Which version of amazon.com is more useful to the customer, the one that offers X or the one that doesn't ? It is difficult to see how the reduction in choice can ever benfit the consumer.

Of course, I've been boycotting Amazon since the one-click patent.

Amazon holds a lot of power over publishers

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon can pretty much push whatever they demand on smaller and even larger publishers these days. As an example, the small press that I work at is required to sell books at a 42% discount rate to Amazon. If we don't comply, they take out books off their listings. Of course Amazon sells it for full price--translation, higher price for consumers due to the chunk Amazon is taking.

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.

Re:Fucking Greed

[Anonymous Coward]

This whole world has basically gone to shit. All we get are news story after news story about how this person or that corporation did something for pure greed.

Oh please. The world has been this way since before written language existed to record the fact. It's nothing new. And while this may seem like a pretty depressing thought, consider the fact that the world hasn't turned out too badly despite all the crap. There's no reason to expect that to change now any more than the rest.

Chilling

[bsandersen]

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:Amazon is just like all the rest....

[rhakka]

why do you need a publisher to select for quality?

can't a reviewer, friend, or recommendation algorithm select for YOUR particular needs better?

as an end user, I don't give a fig for publishers any more than I can about "recording" companies. The act of printing is trivial now.

What you're looking for is a marketing department that specializes in book promotion and who's willing to take the risk for a cut of the profit. The "publishing" part of it is not where the value is.

Re:No surprise here

[Kalriath]

Because that's illegal. Amusing, when you consider that the prime reason Slashdotters use for pirating music, movies and software is that unlike books, they're not a physical product. And here you are, advocating the pirating of physical products just because they can be digitised. There's your proof, it's not about "open formats" and "decent pricing", it's about wanting shit and being too damn cheap to pay for it.

Re:Amazon is just like all the rest....

[Rakishi]

I care about the content of a book not the fluff attached to it myself. I regularly read 40 year old barely held together books, horrendously mangled OCRed ebooks (for when I can't get the used version of an out of print book), web only work and so on. I really only care about paperback books because they're easier for me to read. Hard cover books simply take up more space and are more difficult to carry about.

In terms of the quality of the content, I don't care much about some single entity saying it's good and it doesn't matter to me if 99.999% of the stuff is junk. I care about that tiny sliver that appeals to me and wouldn't have been normally published (or is now out of print).

Welcome to the glory of the internet. I can get recommendations, summaries, reviews, free chapters and so on with a single click. I can even have a computer program suggest to me what I'd like based on my past behavior.

Re:Amazon is just like all the rest....

[rhakka]

Yes, that's what publishers do now. They act as filters and marketers. Much as "recording companies" do the same.

That aspect of their business has value and can survive, just as the analogs in the music industry will ultimately survive because it has value.

I think you're being a little narrow minded to think it can ONLY happen under the traditional auspices of a traditional publisher. Certainly the AMA can certify or even commission textbooks on medicine. Trade groups have a long history of commissioning texts. Science associations can't do the same? Word of mouth is the only mechanism other than a publishing company?

Printing isn't a bad thing, nor is your example. it's just a commodity service now. it's not where what we currently call "publishers" have value.

it's 1 am though and I'm probably just being pedantic.

Fucking Greed: the important part

[DogDude]

You're absolutely right. But these businesses wouldn't be around and doing this shit if the customers weren't lined up handing over their hard-earned cash to these companies, looking for nothing but the cheapest widget or the cheapest book. It's not just businesses. It's individuals, too.

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.

Re:Chilling

[Pennidren]

I fear we may be seeing more of Amazon than that--and it isn't a good thing

the seeing part is good. the thing we are seeing is not.

Alternatives?

[beegle]

What other online booksellers are out there? Particularly booksellers that deal with POD?

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:Choice is Good, OK?

[pla]

Sometimes a book's contents are more important than the presentation

Not much of a market for your thesis/dissertation, though...


The inconvenience of it all is why print is dying.

I disagree... If I want to read a book, I still massively prefer to pick up a rectangular paper block and flip through its pages, over either ebooks or POD (or printing the ebook myself). But with the growing volume of material available online, I find that I don't need to read books so often. Whether fiction for enjoyment, or technical references, I can get most of my reading material (legally) for free online. That has hurt dead-tree publishers, not the inconvenience of books.

Re:Amazon is just like all the rest....

[techno-vampire]

What you don't understand, and probably don't want to is that editors and publishers don't decide what I read. What they do is decide which manuscripts are worth reading by anybody. I've read bits and pieces of books by a number of aspiring writers and, believe me, Sturgeon's Law is, if anything, an understatement. With traditional companies, I can go to a brick and mortar store, look at the book and see for myself if it's something I'd like. With POD, I can't. And if it turns out to be unreadable, incoherent bombast and fustian, I can't return it and get my money back because POD places don't take returns. Add that to the complete lack of a selection process by the printers and you'll see why I am leery to trust it, even though I too have a humor book in print that way.

Re:Why would you use a traditional publisher anywa

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Even so, there's one, important thing you're missing that the traditional companies do: they provide all the money needed to assemble, print, distribute and market your book, then give you a percentage of what comes in.

But the actual monetary cost of assembly and printing via print-on-demand is close enough to zero that it makes little difference. The major expense is time, and if you've got the time to write a whole book worth publishing, you're obviously not too worried about that. And as I noted before, the distribution and marketing advantages of using a major publishing house are highly overrated if you're not writing the kind of book that's mass market and going to make it into bricks and mortar bookstores, while the percentage you get back is literally an order of magnitude less than you would via POD.

Going POD or self-publishing means that you have to pony up in advance, with no guarantee that you'll recover your investment, let alone make a profit.

I hate to break this to you, but going via an old school publisher is no guarantee you'll ever cover your advance or make a profit, either. In any case, it will take a lot more book sales before you do...