Amazon Muscles Print-On-Demand Services

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1. Arc Tangent
   

   March 27th, 2008 at 10:37 pm

   Duncan, your first sentence nearly gave me a heart attack: “Amazon is dropping HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster etc. and ONLY selling books published by…BookShare?!” But then I read on and saw you meant just the DIY operations. Whew!

2. Andy Wong
   

   March 27th, 2008 at 10:37 pm

   Any such action pushing up the prices is bad news for consumers. I wonder whether Amazon will get a lawsuit for such monopoly operation.

3. Angela Hoy
   

   March 27th, 2008 at 11:05 pm

   Amazon’s print on demand division is already printing books for many traditional publishers.

   You can read much more about this situation in today’s issue of WritersWeekly . com.

4. Print on demand
   

   March 27th, 2008 at 11:22 pm

   Print on demand shouldn’t cause price to increase, in fact, it will decrease price. When a book is printed and entered the market, the book can then be sold and resold. With enough supply in the market, there’s very little or no money to be made from printing new book of said book.

   I don’t know how the author gets the idea the price of books will surge in price. The only time when the price will go up is when the demand exceeds supply ability to print books. This is natural with any market, but the fact that books are printed on demand is causing it to increase in price is ridiculous.

5. antje wilsch
   

   March 27th, 2008 at 11:24 pm

   I actually prefer SharedBook.com b/c they have an integrateable API that you can more or less mask as your own site, and allow relatively seamless transition from the site to theirs for collaboration. Lulu and Blurb make you go to their site, login, use their tools, log out. Good for an individual, bad for a company…

6. EC2BOX
   

   March 27th, 2008 at 11:31 pm

   DIY publishing certainly interesting… that said, Amazon’s today’s launching Static IP Addresses for their cloud computing services is more interesting to the cloud computing fans…

7. yongfook
   

   March 28th, 2008 at 12:07 am

   this isn’t very good news at all. The B2C space in this market is narrow enough already with regular consumers having to choose between basically either blurb or lulu, and now with amazon shutting out the latter as a sales outlet…that kind of sucks. I hadn’t even heard of booksurge until this point but a cursory look at their website suggests that their online tools for book creation are archaic compared to lulu and blurb’s offerings.

   :/

8. CARversation.com
   

   March 28th, 2008 at 12:09 am

   BAD NEWS

9. Swaroop
   

   March 28th, 2008 at 3:06 am

   Why does Amazon have both CreateSpace.com and BookSurge.com ?
   They seem to overlap.

10. M.L. Bushman
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 5:33 am

    Oh, this is a prime example of a business shooting itself in the foot. There are 86,000 independent and small publishers who will not, for the most part, take this move by Amazon lying down. Not to mention all the innocent authors caught in the middle.

    Amazon is far too greedy for its own good. My publisher, Jigsaw Press (www.jigsawpress.com) has already made the decision to switch all its outside promotional efforts to Barnes and Noble. From now at least until after Amazon is sued successfully in a class-action suit for restraint of trade, we are boycotting Amazon.

    We invite all authors, independent publishers, and subsidy publishers such as iUniverse, Lulu, Infinity, to do the same.

    What greed and arrogance from a company built by authors and their readers, and their publishers, large and small.

    Google BookSurge complaints. A real eyeopener there.

11. micfo.com
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 6:29 am

    This will affect the print media, I personally prefer reading book from my shelf.

12. contentwords
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 7:01 am

    From what I have read at Writers Weekly your first sentence is plain wrong -Amazon have not announced that it will only sell print-on-demand books printed by its own print-on-demand service BookSurge. Instead a sales person on a call said they have an “eventual desire” to move toward that point. They may be trying to push this through without announcing it (to be honest they don’t even look like they are being that tough), but they may not even go that far if the self-publishers kick up enough fuss. Meanwhile Amazon’s print on demand program is offering more choice to the mainstream publishers who are probably glad to escape Lightning Source’s monopoly - as smaller pod publishers should be too. Amazon does have a great big share of online book sales, but it seems to me that it is generally cautious about flexing any monopolistic muscle. Without Amazon there would be precious few of these small-scale print-on-demand publishers who are now flourishing and I suspect the larger publishers would be even further behind the digital wave than they are now. Some small print on demand publishers may have a battle to fight with Amazon now, but the bigger picture is that Amazon has done and continues to do a hell of a lot for publishers and for readers of books. Amazon’s print on demand division is increasing reader choice and allowing publishers to gain more revenue from good books by prolonging their sales.

13. andrian
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 7:48 am

    http://www.geocities.com/poi243

14. NickeyD
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 7:53 am

    POD technology is getting better every year. No surprise Amazon starting to play with it a bit.

15. Eric Locken
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 8:44 am

    As a:

    1. Customer

    2. Shareholder

    3. Affiliate

    4. Supplier (via Lulu / Lightning Source)

    I am completely disgusted, my shares will be sold today as there is a lot of negative press around this already.

    1, 3 and 4 will be following very quickly if this news is true.

16. Aaron Shepard
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 8:54 am

    BookSurge printing prices are not higher than other POD publishers. What is higher is the discount that publishers are required to give Amazon — 48%. By contrast, Lightning Source publishers can give as little as 20% to wholesalers, giving Amazon even less than that.

    Aaron Shepard
    Author, Aiming at Amazon: The NEW Business of Self Publishing

17. snyggast
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 9:12 am

    Where’s the news on Amazon’s Elastic IP Address?

    http://developer.amazonwebserv.....nalID=1346

18. NBB
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 9:15 am

    This is seriously unfortunate. Last year my team decided to go DIY on a book project. We used a great on demand service to publish and used Amazon to market the book and control the distribution. The POD world is indeed expanding and becoming more interesting, and Amazon’s step to stifle competition with BookSurge is a definite setback for independent publishers. I wasn’t impressed with BookSurge when I checked it out, it seemed unwieldy and expensive compared to other options out there - my guess is that more folks will simply cut Amazon out as their distribution method and turn to alternatives like Barnes and Noble instead.

19. Eric Locken
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 9:35 am

    This could have serious implications for Amazon, this will clearly upsets many authors and could possibly anger some bloggers.

    Authors are not only Amazon’s lifeblood, they probably drive considerable traffic and sales to Amazon, as a considerable number are affiliates and indeed customers themselves.

20. Amanda
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 10:23 am

    What about CreateSpace? From what I understand, BookSurge is more of an involved expenditure. You’re hiring them to design the book and everything else. If you’re an author and a designer (or have a designer), CreateSpace would be much, much better. I hope they stick with CreateSpace too cause I’d never pay BookSurge to do all of the fun stuff for me.

21. Clive
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 10:53 am

    This is appalling news. I discovered a few weeks ago that the “Buy Button” had been turned off at Amazon UK for my recent SF-satire, REBODY. I got nowhere trying to follow this up, but after reading the piece by Writers Weekly, now all becomes clear.
    Booksurge’s prices for printing are way higher than the major provider, Lightning Source. Booksurge’s contract terms are horrible too. Basically if you go with Booksurge as a POD company you’re going third-rate-expensive.
    Amazon’s action is disgraceful; I will be immediately contacting relevant government trade bodies to complain and I urge you to do the same.
    Also I believe we should start to BOYCOTT AMAZON - buy books from their market resellers instead or better, from another online seller such as B&N. Make them feel the pain!

22. ventureblogalist
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 12:57 pm

    this analysis is wrong. POD for vanity publishers is just one part of the market.

23. Angela
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 1:08 pm

    This is bad news for people using Lulu and the other POD services.

    I don’t know whether this is a quality issue - presumably with BookSurge Amazon could require further editing with books it feels don’t meet their quality guidelines - whereas with other POD books, they have no control over the books.

    It will be interesting to see how this affects the POD industry.

24. Julie
    

    March 28th, 2008 at 1:40 pm

    One reason that this will raise prices is due to the fact that small publishers who rely on POD technology may have to use two services in order to get full distribution. Small publishers who used LightningSource (or a service that uses LSI) to print books will be forced to reformat their books for BookSurge. This costs money. Yes, it most likely will drive up the cost of POD books.

25. Jon
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 2:20 am

    Fantastic news with fantastic timing… I was researching this just a few hours ago! This is great because Amazon is THE book seller, having them print and ship your books all in one shot will save a small fortune to small book publishers.

    Jon

26. Marti
    

    March 29th, 2008 at 8:33 pm

    Jon, this is NOT fantastic news. An author who publishes through Lulu can do their own editing and formatting and produce a very professional looking book. Then (until now) they could purchase their own ISBN for less than $100 and get the book listed on Amazon. If that same author is forced to go through BookSurge, their minimum package is $499, and the author doesn’t retain the same sort of rights and freedoms with their own work.

27. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 7:20 pm

    Why is this even a story? They didn’t say you had to use them. They said if you want to be able to take advantage of Amazon’s shipping discount you had to use them. No one is banning the other POD service-printed books from the site, but it’s apparently a slow weekend, so everyone has to whine about big, bad Amazon. They don’t make money on free shipping. They exist to make money. If they aren’t making a profit SOMEWHERE on an order, who is it helping?

28. Author
    

    March 30th, 2008 at 9:50 pm

    A good case can be made that what Amazon is attempting to do violates anti-trust laws. Waiting for federal anti-trust action would take many years–years to get the Justice Department to act, years of trials, years of fussing over what the court decision means. Notice how long it took to deal with Microsoft’s tactics, despite the fact that the corporations they were bullying were large and powerful. None of us can afford that long a wait.

    Action at the state level, however, could move much faster, particularly if it involves off-the-record contact and a somber warning from those who can make trouble for Amazon. Amazon is headquartered in Seattle about a ten minute drive from the office of the Antitrust division of the Washington state attorney general, also in Seattle. Here’s the contact information:

    Office of the Attorney General

    Antitrust Division

    800 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2000

    Seattle, WA 98104-3188

    http://www.atg.wa.gov/Antitrust/default.aspx

    Telephone: 206-587-5510

    Fax: 206-464-6338

    Note the remark on that web page that “The Antitrust Division only processes complaints that involve either Washington State residents or businesses located in Washington State.” Amazon is in Washington state, so it matters not where you are. You might also want to raise the issue with your state attorney general’s antitrust office, asking them to get in touch with their colleagues in Seattle. If you’re a publisher, encourage your authors to write. If you’re an author, encourage other writers to contact them.

29. Aaron Shepard
    

    March 31st, 2008 at 11:45 am

    You might be interested in the post on this issue on my Publishing Blog, “Amazon Declares War on Lightning Source.”

    http://www.aaronshep.com/publishing/blog.html

    Aaron Shepard
    Author, Aiming at Amazon
    Webmaster, Sales Rank Express