POD Braces Itself Against Amazon

OMNIpotusCOM writes "As we've previously discussed, Amazon is in the process of taking the 'Buy' buttons off of published on demand (POD) books that were not created by Amazon's in-house publisher, BookSurge. PODdy Mouth has been reporting reactions throughout the week (including an open letter from Amazon), culminating today in letters to Amazon and their board by the Author's Guild, Small Publishers Association of North America, and the Publishers Marketing Association. Possible lawsuits are looming ... is it enough to change Amazon's mind?"

Comments

Amazon or ebay incognito?

[sakdoctor]

What is up with Amazons latest strategy?

In the past there was always products sold by amazon, and then a link to 'used & new' which I never touched because when I go to amazon, I'm looking specifically to by a NEW item from amazon themselves, and for amazon to take direct responsibility if there are any fuck ups.

Now they are trying really hard to blur the lines between their own products and those of other vendors.
I only noticed this after I bought an item which I had no reason to believe was *not* coming from amazon, when I got an email saying:

Would you like to leave RIP_U_OFF_4_THE_LULZ feedback on your recent purchase?

This is not a good direction, but hey, they practically have a monopoly on cheap online books so what am I gonna do.

Re:Amazon or ebay incognito?

[alen]

for cheap tech books, bookpool.com is the way to go. way cheaper than amazon

Re:Amazon or ebay incognito?

[CRCulver]

In the past there was always products sold by amazon, and then a link to 'used & new' which I never touched because when I go to amazon, I'm looking specifically to by a NEW item from amazon themselves, and for amazon to take direct responsibility if there are any fuck ups.

That's funny, because I always go straight for the "Used and new listings". For CDs, third-party sellers like Caiman or NEWBURYCOMICS are better value than than Amazon itself. To give an example appropriate for this week, Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise is over $10 cheaper by choosing Caiman than ordering from Amazon itself. Yet, the product is exactly the same: a nicely wrapped, brand-new CD (and Caiman doesn't ship cut-outs).

If I could deal directly with these third-party sellers and cut out Amazon, I would, and maybe I'd save a dollar more. But getting them from Amazon is convenient. And if you are worried about a third-party seller screwing you over, from the community feedback you can get a good idea is the third-party seller is reputable. For CDs, I've never had any problems with either Caiman or NEWBURYCOMICS, while a couple of minor sellers have disappointed me on occasion.

For books, the high cost of shipping from third-party sellers often cancels out the savings, unfortunately.

Re:Amazon or ebay incognito?

[IBBoard]

I'd noticed a similar pattern. Amazon used to stock a huge proportion of the books they listed, now you hit a lot of listings and all you get is a "new/used" link to some company of unknown quality. They're all traders registered with Amazon, so the new quality should be the same (and can be a lot cheaper) but why the shirking of responsibility for actually selling stuff?

POD sounds like a good idea, but forcing a single supplier seems like potential commercial suicide (probably not for such a big company, but certainly not helpful).

Re:Amazon or ebay incognito?

[Oktober Sunset]

Ahhh, good old RIP_U_OFF_4_THE_LULZ, now there's a good old fashioned bookseller you can really trust.

Re:Amazon or ebay incognito?

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple years ago, Amazon started allowing third party sellers to create product pages (what Amazon calls detail pages) on the Amazon site. More recently, Amazon started allowing sellers to create pages for pre-ISBN books (books that were published before the ISBN system became standard).

I.e. many of the books that don't have an Amazon presence would not be listed on the site otherwise, because the book itself is out of print and Amazon can't get copies from the publisher.

I'd be interested in seeing an example product where there is no indication that the product is not from Amazon. That sounds like a bug. The usual experience is like http://www.amazon.com/Webkinz-Black-White-Panda-Plush/dp/B000HPNK6Y/ -- note that it clear says "Ships from and sold by ABCTOY4me" above the Add to Cart button.

This whole exclusive POD thing is odd in that it is a restriction on *buyers* more than on sellers. Sellers can still sell POD on Amazon, but now the buyer has to jump through an extra hoop to make the purchase. How does that help Amazon? Third party sales offer Amazon a 15% commission without any manufacturing liability. What makes the Booksurge sales more valuable than that? Also, will Amazon actually sell copies of these items? Or are they just chasing selection off of their site?

Re:Amazon or ebay incognito?

[Foobar of Borg]

This is not a good direction, but hey, they practically have a monopoly on cheap online books so what am I gonna do.

Well, there is powells.com (which is the website for a bookstore in Portland, OR) and abebooks.com, which is a conglomeration of independent bookstores. And that's just off the top of my head. Seriously, there are quite a number of other choices. You just have to look.

Re:Amazon or ebay incognito?

[MBGMorden]

Half.com is eBay's basic counterpart to Amazon's service that you describe, and I use it often, but sometimes there are issues there, and for certain things I can agree with the OP in that I want to deal with a COMPANY, not another user.

For example, there was a point where I was just too afraid to order a season of Babylon 5 off of Half.com for the simple reason that many of the listings were of the Chinese version. Now, in an interesting twist there were in English with Chinese subtitles (that you didn't have to turn on), so technically it was a watchable season, but it didn't work for somebody really looking to collect the official US-versions of the show.

Then I've noticed rampant misrepresentation in categories too. Half.com has lots of condition categories like "Brand New", "Like New", "Very Good", etc. If you're not careful you can get scammed here. Countless times I've seen something like a video game listed in the "Brand New" category and the description reads "Brand New!!! - Only played once to try it!". Sometimes I just want to shake whoever wrote that while screaming "THEY MADE THE LIKE NEW CATEGORY FOR A REASON YA NITWIT!!!!!".

So yeah, I can see where he's coming from. Amazon's 3rd party seller program, Half.com, ebay, etc, all have a "flea market" aspect to them. Sometimes that's worth dredging through, but sometimes I want to avoid it. Amazon would be unwise to take away my method of avoiding it.

*duh*

[theaceoffire]

I am gonna go way, WAY out on a limb here and say "No".

No major company would willingly piss off this many people and customers without carefully considering how it would affect them (Not if it plans on remaining a major company).

They probably have estimates of how many lawsuits are likely, their probability of success, how many donuts they are gonna eat during the trials...

That said, SHOULD they change their mind? I think that forcing your customers into one path tends to piss them off, especially if your forcing them into a path that is extremely profitable for you (AKA MS Vendor lockin).

It might work in the short run, but it could damage Amazon's brand name.

Re:*duh*

[$RANDOMLUSER]

No major company would willingly piss off this many people and customers without carefully considering how it would affect them (Not if it plans on remaining a major company).

Microsoft, Sony, and eBay leap to mind...

Re:*duh*

[Maxo-Texas]

I'm going to blow my moderation and chip in.

There was a major company that pwned mainframe change control.

So completely that they raised prices over 100% in one year, laid off 50% of their support staff, and reduced commissions to their salespeople.

It so pissed off their customer base that they basically died in 2005 to 2007 period. It didn't matter what they did to try to make things right, the customers were so angry that they were not going back regardless. My large corp will no longer use them by policy.

Human beings lead companies. If the top 3-5 human beings have a brain fart, (say like Bear Stearns) then the rest of their workers get pulled along for the ride.

Oh.. and at my large corp, they specifically only listen to ignorant outside contractors advice for the last 12-15 years, ignoring the advice of the experts they hired (and wonder why their staff is quasi pissed off-- hmm hire an expert and then ignore his advice over that of clueless newbs).

I agree your process is what happens in a well managed company-- probably 10-15% of major corps.

Thin end of the wedge

[Chrisq]

What happens if books are available on POD and in a conventionally printed form. There is nothing to stop BookSurge offering out-of-print classics through POD.

What's to stop Amazon only allowing POD versions of these books to customers. You may want a high-quality leather-bound Shakespeare, but Amazon may only let you have a POD paperback!

Also, what about authors who already have POD contracts with other publishers. They are condemned never to appear on amazon searches, which a lot of people use to find books on esoteric subjects thinking they cover most available material.

Re:Thin end of the wedge

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Also, what about authors who already have POD contracts with other publishers. They are condemned never to appear on amazon searches, which a lot of people use to find books on esoteric subjects thinking they cover most available material.

Amazon are pretty dominant in the on-line book sales market at the moment, but moves like this won't keep them that way. It seems to me that they are creating a big opportunity for one of their rivals to get ahead with the small/independent publishers. If I were an executive at, say, Barnes & Noble or Bookpool, I would be rubbing my hands together with glee, contacting the kinds of industry body mentioned in these blog posts, and talking about new ways to promote these markets more aggressively.

Re:Thin end of the wedge

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I don't understand this prejudice that people have shown in this discussion and the other recent one on a related subject. Sure, there are a lot of people using POD or certain small publishers who are basically vanity authors. But there are also some people who write well and provide useful, interesting or funny material.

The thing is, the story is exactly the same with the large publishing houses. While the signal-noise ratio may be somewhat better, I'm not convinced it's by much: most of the widely advertised technical books I've bought from major publishers recently have been disappointing, too.

For example, I've followed the work of Simon Peyton-Jones for a while now. He wrote a chapter in Beautiful Code about Software Transactional Memory, which was also freely available on-line. It was up to his usual excellent standards: interesting, informative and highly readable. I wondered what else I might learn and bought the whole book... and found that much of the rest is obvious, boring, and generally not worth the cost of the paper it's printed on. And this was the much-hyped, much-awarded, critically-acclaimed book of the year, full of insights that let you see into the minds of some of the brightest stars in our industry today? Bollocks was it.

As a more subtle example, I preferred Code Complete's first edition to the second. I found the advice in the latter often contrary to my own experiences of what works well — a criticism I rarely, if ever, levelled at the first edition. The revised version reads like McConnell (or his publisher?) felt he should cover now-mainstream topics like exceptions and OO. Alas, rather than filling it with solid, practical advice and evidence from the trenches as in the first version, the revised version is just full of examples using trendy OO languages. But worse, the new parts contain a lot of commentary that sounds more like the standard OO marketing spiel than the battle-hardened wisdom of the earlier book. I half-expect to see a third edition in a few years, suddenly discovering the joys of functional programming languages and proclaiming the advantages of computing without state, just as the industry leaders are approaching Peyton-Jones's "both useful and safe" utopia and concluding that sometimes state really is the easiest way to express things as long as it's managed in a controlled way.

It's unfortunate that these are the first two examples that came to my mind, because they are far from the worst books on the market today. Indeed, there is enough really good material in either that I would still recommend them (with caveats) to a lot of people. But they are also good examples of the fact that just having a big name publisher is no guarantee you'll get a great book. If you can take work from authors of the calibre of Peyton-Jones and McConnell, yet produce books like Beautiful Code and Code Complete, 2nd Edition, you are doing something wrong.

Re:Thin end of the wedge

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Sorry to reply to my own post, but I feel obliged to point out for anyone who doesn't know that Beautiful Code is a compendium of chapters written by many different contributing authors. I mentioned Peyton-Jones by name, but he was only responsible for that one (very good) chapter; the disappointing material I mentioned came from some of the other contributors. Sorry for not making this clear in the parent post.

This is a problem for the Nmap book

[fv]

This is a major problem for my upcoming book documenting the Nmap Security Scanner. I was planning to print Nmap Network Scanning with Lightning Source POD and sell it through Amazon. Now Amazon says I need to use their own BookSurge company instead. Leaving aside the anti-competitive nature of this, there is the issue of BookSurge's terrible quality reputation. They are known for missing pages, printing covers upside-down, etc. So people who buy my book through Amazon will be stuck with the shitty BookSurge version, and they will surely blame me for this. I really hope Amazon relents, or I will have to rethink my whole distribution plan. I'm now against using BookSurge on principle. If Amazon keeps playing these anti-competitive games, at least there is always online distribution. Almost half of the book chapters are already online for free:

• Nmap Reference Guide
• Nmap Install Guide
• Nmap Scripting Engine
• Remote OS Detection
• Version Detection
• Zenmap User's Guide

And I hope to free more chapters in the coming week. Amazon may not care about losing my Nmap book, but I hope enough people stand up to Amazon that they really feel the effect!

-Fyodor

Re:This is a problem for the Nmap book

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't this only apply to POD? If you're printing more than 500, which I assume you will be, then this isn't a big deal. You can use your favorite local printer and ship them in batches of 50 to Amazon who then redistribute them to their supply depots. Amazon aren't saying you must only use their printers for everything, just low volume print on demand.

Besides, this is only limited to the "Buy now" option on their website pages. You can still list a book with Amazon as a reseller, link it to your own web page and then sell them from there. In fact you would make a greater profit by doing that because you wouldn't be paying Amazon 30%-40%.

Finally, do some research and you will see that there's a pattern amongst all authors like you Fyodor. Because I like to give the author the maximum money for their efforts I always buy direct from them if I can. O'Reilly, McMillan, Elsevier etc have all scaled back their production of textbooks in the last few years so recently I've noticed a pattern where for numerous books on niche technical subjects the author does:

1) Write a quality textbook
2) Publish it on your website and do the marketing yourself (people buy the book from where _you_ tell them to)
3) Once you pass the 2000 mark and students start ordering through bookshops a distributer like Barnes & Noble _come_to_you_ !!!
4) You are in a position to negotiate a non-exclusive distribution and continue to sell from your website in competition
5) Now you're in a win-win situation, you get the Amazon listings via the distributer and the larger profit for the 20-30% of
customers who still come through your website
6) Once you pass the 5-10000 mark you will find publishers start to serenade you, again you can negotiate a non-exclusive deal
because you've done all the work/marketing and the publisher can offer no real consideration, you have them where you want.

So, the first step when you finish the book is to register a company as a small publisher, buy a small block of ISBN numbers (10), print 500
or 1000 (not POD) and list yourself on Amazon as an traditional independent producer, ship some to Amazon on return and place a link to your site.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[CRCulver]

The FSF and Stallman called off their boycott of Amazon nearly six years ago. Get with the times.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[dreamchaser]

Um, ok, but it's my boycott, not theirs. I'm not a lemming like so many others are. Since my inital reason for not doing business with them they have done little to nothing to make me care enough to give them any. You shop where you want, I'll shop where I want :)

have a nice day

Re:Do not pass Go?

[Pollardito]

maybe because they don't have a majority of the market, even this computerworld article critical of the move and claiming monopolistic tactics says they have 15% of the market

Re:Self Published Dreck

[Fieryphoenix]

POD isn't really about self publishing, even though it lends itself well to it. It's about books always being "in print", no matter how obscure or small the demand.