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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....
It seems like it would require significant work to set up a line to and account with every print-on-demand service an author cares to use.. why would Amazon jump through hoops to accomodate competitors? This seems like a very specialized situation that Amazon should have plenty of free reign to work with however they'd like.. I think it's surprising that they were even accomodating print-on-demand services in the first place.
I am outraged! Good thing I just made some homemade prozac out of ice cream and bleach.
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.
...why not just acquire e-books(in a more open format) through another vendor?
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.
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, 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.
Find free books.
I use POD services for portfolios and presentation books. I can get a 40 page four color for $20 a copy with no minimums. They look decent and I can print what I need. There's an even bigger reason the service is mainly for wantabes, you can't make money off them. You can't compete with the high run publishers for price or quality. It's a handy service but I would never use POD for a retail business.
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 wonder if anyone would want to buy it??
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.
What in the world are they thinking? This seems to be a pretty flagrant abuse of power.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
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.
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 !
90% of everything is crap.
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 someday.
My first published work was back in 1987. My next published work will be a how-to piece on configuring apt, it'll be on Informit in a month or so.
Upside of POD? Control of content, much higher profit per book, and control over how the book is publicized and marketed. If you actually want to sell a POD book, build your own website and promote it using the POD site as a back end to take orders, don't depend on potential readers finding your book among the thousands published on their site. And spend the extra money to buy a package including an ISBN so they can be ordered through brick-and-mortar bookstores.
Downside: No megacorporate budget to buy shelf space, but unless you're already "A" list, you aren't going to get much help from your publisher anyway. If you want a book professionally edited, find a good editor and prepare for sticker shock when you get the hourly rate and time estimate.
Remember that for a professional writer, the point behind writing is profit. You might be able to make more with 10K book sales via POD than 100K book sales via a mainstream publisher. And that very few mainstream published books earn out their advances.
Tech Public Policy stuff
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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Pretty much all of the Print-On-Demand in the US is done, ultimately, through LSI. Their titles are available through Ingram, from whom every bookstore buys. So if you want a POD title, you can get it online from Barnes and Noble, or you can special order it through your local bookstore.
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 be easy to get in many cases, if they refused to sell books with a "short discount"), they they want to do the printing and get paid ridiculously high amounts for it.
It has been the golden age of printing for a little while, now, when it was relatively cheap and easy to publish, and the gatekeepers of the market weren't the only way to go to press. Sure, it meant you could order a lot of junk if you wanted to--but you could also order a lot of Indie stuff, and a lot of things that didn't seem like they'd sell a million copies. The profit margins on book publication are low, especially for the time and work that goes into writing a decent book in the first place--the opportunity cost really makes the profit margins negative in most cases. For hundreds and hundreds of small presses, this lowers them further.
Buy at Barnes and Noble, or special-order through your local bookseller.
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.
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 the percentage you get back is literally an order of magnitude less than you would via POD.
Going POD or self-publishing means that you have to pony up in advance, with no guarantee that you'll recover your investment, let alone make a profit.
I hate to break this to you, but going via an old school publisher is no guarantee you'll ever cover your advance or make a profit, either. In any case, it will take a lot more book sales before you do...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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
Eric Baird
"Customer A" orders a copy regardless, and you immediately send their copy to amazon. The amazon system then registers that copy as "in stock", and sits on it for four to six weeks, on the assumption that the customer doesn't need to have it before then. During this time, amazon get to show the book as available from stock (next day delivery available). This makes it easier for them to get further sales.
After a week "Customer B" comes along, sees that the book is in stock at amazon, and buys a copy. Amazon then immediately send "Customer B" the copy that was originally ordered in for Customer A, with next day delivery as promised, and reorders another copy from you, for "A". You dutifully send the second copy to amazon immediately. Their system looks at the existing order, realises that it still doesn't have to be supplied for several weeks, and flags it again as as available stock. After another week they sell the second copy to "customer C", who's again seen it marked as in stock and available for immediate delivery.
So poor old Customer A gets screwed, because they ordered the book when it had a long quoted lead-time, and that quoted lead-time gets attached to their order - amazon treats their copy as unallocated and hangs onto it until the last possible moment, and all the successive customers, who are quoted a short lead time, get to leapfrog A's order. A's order is treated as "pseudostock" and only gets sent to A at the last possible moment ... assuming that it hasn't just been sold again to someone else.
From amazon's point of view it means that everyone gets sent the book within the promised timeframe (unless A is especially unlucky, which can happen), and amazon get to "stock" the book at zero risk, because their "stock" is guaranteed pre-sold. ... point of view, amazon are giving a good service, keeping the book in stock and supplying it promptly.
From B, C, D's
From A's point of view, they don't understand why their mates who ordered the same book after them get sent copies by amazon after a few days, while their copy, which was ordered first, takes two months to arrive.
It's just amazon's clever stock allocation system at work, sometimes it's just a little bit too clever for its own good.
Eric Baird