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Amazon Insists Publishers Use Their On-Demand Printer

Posted by kdawson on from the why-that's-blackmail dept.

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.'"

1 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Choice is Good, OK? by gnutoo · · Score: 4, 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. 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.