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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.'"
I wrote a sci-fi novel 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
Careful What You Wish For....
They should play that up in their stores: these books are *not available* at amazon.com!
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. 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.
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. Yes because children were never put into coal mines in the past, forests weren't so smog covered as to cause insects to change from white to black for camouflage, humans weren't made slaves and didn't die in droves while shoved into overcrowded ships, whole empires didn't exists solely from their conquest of other nations, wars weren't started for the profits of an empire and so on.
We are greedy, almost every single one of us is and that's because we are human. Evolution itself dictates we be greedy, it is greed personified. The fit are to survive and reproduce while the less fit are to be trampled upon by nature. You only win at evolution at the cost of someone else because in the end you all want the same piece of pie and only some of you get it. Well your genes win which may involve your early and very painful death if it keeps your relatives alive but that's a separate issue.
i have published a book on POD on a very eclectic topic which no mainstream publisher would have touched with a bargepole ... and I am perfectly happy with the fact that 50 copies have been sold globally ... And in terms of layout and look-and-feel I have made every effort to make it perfect. So what is wrong with POD ?
Just because you have published a book on the traditional route does NOT mean that the rest of us POD enthusiasts should do so as well.
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
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?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.