Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
Gotta get mine -- especially if it makes me a billionaire -- regardless of what it does to anyone else, the environment, or even their own country.
We're fighting a war for, and on behalf of, oil companies. American manufacturers have shipped jobs and technology overseas. The car companies made giant cars knowing full well that they wasted energy and contributed to global warming. 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.
Why? Because someone could make a buck off it somehow regardless of what it meant for the long-term health of this country, its citizens, and our economy. Even the world.
I don't know why I expected anything different from Amazon.