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.'"
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
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if amazon is letting people submit an ebook for POD then there is a problem there houston... it's a little different if it's a text file from project Gutenberg, and it's on the 'American' mirror, but not many textbooks are going to fall under anything but well copyrighted material.
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sure it's kinda the copyright holders fault for not putting it in a no printing allowed pdf, instead of distributing it as either a regular pdf, or as a text file, even if it was on a cd-rom printed in 1990 way before anyone had heard of t
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Most of the POD publishers have this. The e-book is available for sale as another option. But Amazon already dropped other e-book sales after they bought their own e-book publisher.
Shades of what was to come.
rd
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No we're not.
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.
Maybe the true motivation for this is to push the (Score:2)
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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
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Amazon has gone down the tubes but I would like to thank them for prompting me to go back into the bookstores. I had forgotten how much I liked checking out new titles recommended by a real person rather than an algorithm that has difficulty differentiating between my interests and gifts I purchased.
Re:Amazon is just like all the rest.... (Score:5, Informative)
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See:
http://www.artechhouse.com/Default.asp?Publish=1&Frame=reason12.html [artechhouse.com]
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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.
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why do you need a publisher to select for quality?
can't a reviewer, friend, or recommendation algorithm select for YOUR particular needs better?
You DO realize that a publisher is, abstracted, someone you hire to recommend a book you like? That the whole "marketing" apparatus includes every book review, word-of-mouth recommendation, and "if you like X, you'll like Y" wannabe in existence?
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.
Publishing is the act of fronting money to get a book printed, usually for a cut of the gross revenue. Didn't Family Guy have an episode about this?
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I think you misunderstand. A traditional publisher only accepts those books that meet certain standards of writing quality. This includes, but is not limited to proper spelling, grammar, syntax and appropriate use of the language. It also, probably, includes minimizing the use of the passive voice and advancing the story by showing what happens instead of telling the reader. POD companies, OTOH, accept whatever the writer wants put into print except, in most cases, hate literature. A traditional publisher will work with the writer to correct any flaws in the manuscript and in some cases require scenes to be rewritten, while a POD company simply takes camera ready copy and puts it out. I'm not saying that there aren't good books to be found in the POD lineups -- Piers Anthony has put his entire backlist out via Xlibris -- but the average quality is poor by comparison to that put out by companies who pick and choose their product.
You point being? If someone wants to put out a quality book with a POD they simply need to pay someone to do the editing for them. The same is already done with regular self-publishing I believe so it's not exactly uncommon. Likewise vanity presses don't even do much more than dump the book onto the market.
The grandparents point was that the selection part isn't necessary and the number of quality works isn't going to be smaller, possibly. The difference is in who gets you decide what works are quality and
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Don't be any more silly than you have to be. Of course not. What I meant is that the editorial staff of that company have picked out what they think are the best and most marketable (Not always, I'll grant, the same thing.) of the manuscripts submitted to them for publication and rejected the rest. Presuming that they know their business, that means that the quality of their work will, on the
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Your point being? All you've done is listed one of the problems of POD for an aspiring author: the need to invest your own money in your work to get it in print. For a professional author, as I've said in another post in this thread, money flows from the publisher, through the agent, if there is one, to the author; never, under any possible circumstances in the other direction.
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all I'm trying, unsuccesfully to say, is that those functions do not have to be tied to a company that physically prints books. Perhaps that's a nice all in one service, but if other companies can be competitive AND offer another avenue to access for writers that m
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A (good) publisher does a lot more than printing. If that's all you need, just talk directly to a printer. They arrange editing, layout, design, artwork. They oversee printing and check quality and costs. They should try to sell rights to other publishers in other languages and countries They arrange distribution and billing. They get books reviewed in real newspapers, inte
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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 commission
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Then the biology textbook which the doctors of tomorrow will buy today can be selected by word of mouth recommendation?
Isn't that pretty much how they're selected already? I'm sure a lot more get published than actually get used regularly and someone tells doctors which are the "good books," likely colleagues or professors.
Or will the reviewers go though all the crap that's out there and figure out which is the best? Oh, wait, that's what publishers do now.
So what exactly do we lose in this? Instead of having a small set of reviewers and never seeing the unpublished works we now get even more reviewers (professional and casual) and a wider amount of published works. Welcome to the internet where everyone is a potential reviewer.
Also I find most stuff publ
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physically printing what I want from that list, there is no reason why that needs to be hard; it is trivial. This was not true in times past..but now, it is. Your catchall company "publisher" who is doing things other than physically producing books does more that is
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 somed
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Sturgeon's Law [wikipedia.org] is that 90% of everything is crud. If you are crapping crud [princeton.edu], you should see a doctor.
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As far as this goes, you're right. However, if you stick to reading books published by traditional companies, you'll at least miss all of the badly-written, incoherent, unreadable crud that the editors have rejected. That's not true in POD! Except for filtering out hate literature, POD publishes anythin
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?
Re:Why would you use a traditional publisher anywa (Score:2)
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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
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I'll go further than that: the odds are that whatever you get for an advance will be the only money you ever see from your book because most books don't earn out their advances. However, there is no possible way that you are going to be out-of-pocket for any of the expenses involved, and that's Just Not
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I would say this about any book from any publisher. That's why I read a sample chapter if available from publsher and buyer reviews on Amazon before I buy.
Now obviously, POD publishers print anything a person pays to have printed, so it could be lunatic ravings as far as that is concerned. But no one will ever see the book unless they're browsing through online book sites with some kind of search that happens to bring
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Well, perhaps. Except for the fact that most POD publishers pretty-much exclusively print the same kind of junk you find in vanity publishin
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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the majority of 'readers' are female, so book topics that appeal to men only get less play with editors, unless they know there are millions of men who might wan
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.
POD upfront price (Score:2)
I use lulu [slashdot.org] because they don't have an upfront cost. Then again, I don't expect to make money from this - it's a hobby with me.
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It's very very hard to sell at least one copy.
rd
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Yes, as everyone knows from tv nowadays, there is incredible interest in true crime but publishers will not take on true crime books about a crime unless and until there is a verdict, with very few exceptions.
Self-publishing POD would be the only way to get your true crime book published.
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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
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In terms of the quality of the content, I don't care much about some single entity saying it's goo
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I wish all POD books would just go away for the most part. They are often of poor quality both in content and presentation.
I wrote a sci-fi novel last year and we published it hardback with our own press.
Have you, I mean, actually LOOKED at your website?
Good writing is good writing, if it's printed in a collector's edition hardback or a dot-matrix ebook. Unfortunately, sometimes bad writing in a collector's edition hardback LOOKS like good writing, and enough of the folks who poney up the $30 for a copy delude themselves that the genre gets another hack on the shelf.
Mass-market books are returnable because the publisher expects enough of the ten-thousand or so of the first run to sell to make a profit.
a lot of legitimate academic stuff is POD (Score:2)
stop being snobbish about POD ... (Score:3, Interesting)
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I work in publishing, mostly conventional offset, but have prepared several POD books. The quality can be almost as good as offset. Even interior colour recently, but I mostly just do text. Anyway, POD is very useful to make books availa
Uh OK (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uh OK (Score:5, Informative)
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There should be something illegal about pressuring business associates in one market you have control over, to stifle competition in another market you are also involved in.
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There should be something illegal about pressuring business associates in one market you have control over, to stifle competition in another market you are also involved in.
Amazon isn't preventing anyone from selling
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If that's the case, isn't there some law to prevent you from squeezing your only competition by placing unjustifiable limitations on the market? Not saying they're a monopoly...
Until Amazon.com is a monopoly, they can do whatever the hell they want.
They are the Wal-Mart of online bookstores, but they do have competition. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ [barnesandnoble.com], target.com, half.com... and, oddly enough, wal-mart.com.
"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 also won't sell my homemade drugs (Score:2, Funny)
Soapboxing (Score:3, Insightful)
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First, I'm not necessarily pro-Amazon here, just not convinced that they're being bad guys in this one case.
Even if they're customer friendly in some sense they still aren't meeting their vision statement since they're supposed to be a place where you can by anything you want.
What if their experience with 3rd-party POD vendors was so bad that the only way they could guarantee a decent customer service was to do it themselves? Perhaps the others' quality was poor, or their turnaround time was unacceptable, or their shipping logistics couldn't scale to Amazon's level, or they were somehow else unable to meet the requirements. If that were true, I could see their case: t
No surprise here (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No surprise here (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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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It's incredible that this post was modded informative. Amazon bought their own POD publisher and printer Booksurge in 2005 and is now in the process of requiring that POD's sold by Amazon be printed by their subsidiary. There is also a change to percentage requirements of the sale on Amazon that further benefits Amazon.
In addition, accor
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.
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the margins in retail demand efficiencies at every point. those extra bar codes are one of the reasons why amazon is willing to keep your product in stock.
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Competition for Amazon? (Score:2)
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.
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the seeing part is good. the thing we are seeing is not.
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.
Re:Chilling, but easy to route around (Score:2)
Amazon is forgetting that their market share is of the easy-c
Quick, to the BatSignal to summon Capt. AntiTrust! (Score:2)
heh (Score:2)
Who really cares about print on demand books anyway? The future is clearly electronic--just not on the Kindle
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.
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 b
Yet Another Way for Google to Make Money (Score:2)
That's similar to what B&N, Borders, et al do. They also provide the distribution organization, warehouses, accounting, shipping, etc. That is a significant investment. I would imagine that most small publishers (and even larger ones) will want to use the lowest
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They are not to books what ebay is to online auctions.
There are many other competitors.
I bought many college texts online. None from amazon.
In fact, the only commerce i've done on amazon in the last 5 years resulted in 500 dollars worth of fraud which ended up irrecoverable because of the glacial pace amazon customer service took in addressing the issue.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I wonder if anyone would want to buy it??
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At the moment, a dead-tree book is the best tool for reading, so I use it. Simple as that.
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I don't write in novels. I do in text books and reference books.
You simply use the best tool for the job.
Paperback: I can carry one book, and it doesn't really fit in my pocket, so I have to throw it in my backpack and it gets stolen. Luckily it's cheap, so I can buy another copy.
PDA: I can carry 50 (or 500) books in my Clie, they fit in my pocket, I've carried my Clie in my pocket for several years now without
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Disclaimer: I don't read fiction.
That's kind of like saying "I don't like music." But anyway.
Maybe I'm a little too future-happy, but why is paper still relevant today ? If you have the document in electronic form, read it electronically! I'd rather walk around with an ebook reader device than pay some old-world scrooge just to print stuff.
The replacement cost of a lost paperback is $20, tops. Assuming you need to special-order it from a scrounger on ebay. The replacement cost of even the cheapest ebook reading device available (The low-end Palm) is close to $100. The additional cost to read a printed book is $0. The additional cost to read an ebook is the electricity to power your reader -- not $0, even if not significantly so. If you drop a paperback book, the worst thing t
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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
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Re: (Score:2)
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.
Odd, all I've seen lately are news stories about gossip, sex, and self-promotion of one sort or another. Where are you getting your news?
(Oh, btw -- for every greedy SOB you find, assume the existance of two generious SOBs, two greedy nice guys, and one bonna fide nice person. The rest of us just kinda live beneath the radar.)
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.