POD Braces Itself Against Amazon 69
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?"
*duh* (Score:5, Insightful)
No major company would willingly piss off this many people and customers without carefully considering how it would affect them (Not if it plans on remaining a major company).
They probably have estimates of how many lawsuits are likely, their probability of success, how many donuts they are gonna eat during the trials...
That said, SHOULD they change their mind? I think that forcing your customers into one path tends to piss them off, especially if your forcing them into a path that is extremely profitable for you (AKA MS Vendor lockin).
It might work in the short run, but it could damage Amazon's brand name.
Re:Thin end of the wedge (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, what about authors who already have POD contracts with other publishers. They are condemned never to appear on amazon searches, which a lot of people use to find books on esoteric subjects thinking they cover most available material.
Amazon are pretty dominant in the on-line book sales market at the moment, but moves like this won't keep them that way. It seems to me that they are creating a big opportunity for one of their rivals to get ahead with the small/independent publishers. If I were an executive at, say, Barnes & Noble or Bookpool, I would be rubbing my hands together with glee, contacting the kinds of industry body mentioned in these blog posts, and talking about new ways to promote these markets more aggressively.
Re:*duh* (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vote with your wallet (Score:4, Insightful)
have a nice day
Re:Thin end of the wedge (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand this prejudice that people have shown in this discussion and the other recent one on a related subject. Sure, there are a lot of people using POD or certain small publishers who are basically vanity authors. But there are also some people who write well and provide useful, interesting or funny material.
The thing is, the story is exactly the same with the large publishing houses. While the signal-noise ratio may be somewhat better, I'm not convinced it's by much: most of the widely advertised technical books I've bought from major publishers recently have been disappointing, too.
For example, I've followed the work of Simon Peyton-Jones for a while now. He wrote a chapter in Beautiful Code about Software Transactional Memory, which was also freely available on-line. It was up to his usual excellent standards: interesting, informative and highly readable. I wondered what else I might learn and bought the whole book... and found that much of the rest is obvious, boring, and generally not worth the cost of the paper it's printed on. And this was the much-hyped, much-awarded, critically-acclaimed book of the year, full of insights that let you see into the minds of some of the brightest stars in our industry today? Bollocks was it.
As a more subtle example, I preferred Code Complete's first edition to the second. I found the advice in the latter often contrary to my own experiences of what works well — a criticism I rarely, if ever, levelled at the first edition. The revised version reads like McConnell (or his publisher?) felt he should cover now-mainstream topics like exceptions and OO. Alas, rather than filling it with solid, practical advice and evidence from the trenches as in the first version, the revised version is just full of examples using trendy OO languages. But worse, the new parts contain a lot of commentary that sounds more like the standard OO marketing spiel than the battle-hardened wisdom of the earlier book. I half-expect to see a third edition in a few years, suddenly discovering the joys of functional programming languages and proclaiming the advantages of computing without state, just as the industry leaders are approaching Peyton-Jones's "both useful and safe" utopia and concluding that sometimes state really is the easiest way to express things as long as it's managed in a controlled way.
It's unfortunate that these are the first two examples that came to my mind, because they are far from the worst books on the market today. Indeed, there is enough really good material in either that I would still recommend them (with caveats) to a lot of people. But they are also good examples of the fact that just having a big name publisher is no guarantee you'll get a great book. If you can take work from authors of the calibre of Peyton-Jones and McConnell, yet produce books like Beautiful Code and Code Complete, 2nd Edition, you are doing something wrong.
Re:*duh* (Score:3, Insightful)
There was a major company that pwned mainframe change control.
So completely that they raised prices over 100% in one year, laid off 50% of their support staff, and reduced commissions to their salespeople.
It so pissed off their customer base that they basically died in 2005 to 2007 period. It didn't matter what they did to try to make things right, the customers were so angry that they were not going back regardless. My large corp will no longer use them by policy.
Human beings lead companies. If the top 3-5 human beings have a brain fart, (say like Bear Stearns) then the rest of their workers get pulled along for the ride.
Oh.. and at my large corp, they specifically only listen to ignorant outside contractors advice for the last 12-15 years, ignoring the advice of the experts they hired (and wonder why their staff is quasi pissed off-- hmm hire an expert and then ignore his advice over that of clueless newbs).
I agree your process is what happens in a well managed company-- probably 10-15% of major corps.
Re:Amazon or ebay incognito? (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, there was a point where I was just too afraid to order a season of Babylon 5 off of Half.com for the simple reason that many of the listings were of the Chinese version. Now, in an interesting twist there were in English with Chinese subtitles (that you didn't have to turn on), so technically it was a watchable season, but it didn't work for somebody really looking to collect the official US-versions of the show.
Then I've noticed rampant misrepresentation in categories too. Half.com has lots of condition categories like "Brand New", "Like New", "Very Good", etc. If you're not careful you can get scammed here. Countless times I've seen something like a video game listed in the "Brand New" category and the description reads "Brand New!!! - Only played once to try it!". Sometimes I just want to shake whoever wrote that while screaming "THEY MADE THE LIKE NEW CATEGORY FOR A REASON YA NITWIT!!!!!".
So yeah, I can see where he's coming from. Amazon's 3rd party seller program, Half.com, ebay, etc, all have a "flea market" aspect to them. Sometimes that's worth dredging through, but sometimes I want to avoid it. Amazon would be unwise to take away my method of avoiding it.