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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.'"
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.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Or acquire others more legitimately via http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page .
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
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.
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.
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.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
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.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
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