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?"

Amazon or ebay incognito?

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.

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

Re:Amazon or ebay incognito?

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 [amazon.com] 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.

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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

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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 qu

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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 befor

Re:Amazon or ebay incognito?

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

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I especially love that they seem to be completely unable to ship me anything I want. 9/10 of the items I've recently tried to purchase from Amazon UK, US or DE (Germany) have been labelled 'Currently, this item can only be shipped to the [insert country I

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What country are you in?
Australia gets everything fine. From the .com site anyway.

Vote with your wallet

The savings are not THAT much more than what you can get elsewhere. I stopped buying anything from Amazon when they patented the 'One Click Buy' way back and I have bought nothing from them since. I've payed a couple of bucks more here and there for book

Re:Vote with your wallet

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

Re:Vote with your wallet

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

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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 independen

*duh*

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*

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...

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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 p

Thin end of the wedge

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

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.

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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 peopl

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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 tha

This is a problem for the Nmap book

This is a major problem for my upcoming book documenting the Nmap Security Scanner [nmap.org]. I was planning to print Nmap Network Scanning [nmap.org] 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.org]
• Nmap Install Guide [nmap.org]
• Nmap Scripting Engine [nmap.org]
• Remote OS Detection [nmap.org]
• Version Detection [nmap.org]
• Zenmap User's Guide [nmap.org]

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 [insecure.org]

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Can't you get your own ISBN and then it doesn't matter who you get to print your books? It could be POD, your local publisher, or something else entirely.

Re:This is a problem for the Nmap book

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.

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

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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.