The King Kong of book sales makes a grab…

April 1, 2008  (Bob)

Angela Hoy, one of the two owners of the company that published my print-on-demand book, Moving to Australia: Two Texans Down Under, blew the whistle last week on a heavy-handed threat from a company about which I’d always had positive feelings, Amazon.com. Now their “goodwill” capital with me and lots of others is fading fast. This is not, unfortunately, an April Fools joke. It’s real, and here’s a short version of the story.

Print-on-demand (POD) publishers, and there are many of them, are being told by Amazon.com: We have our own POD company now. We’re going to sell on line only the POD books our company publishes or those of POD companies that pay us a hefty fee and meet other requirements. Take it or leave it.

Authors and would-be authors, who are among Amazon’s best customers, are getting the same message.

Kathy Hendershot-Hurd, my friend and advisor, correctly notes that this story is turning into a viral firestorm for Amazon.com. Of course, Amazon.com may be too dominant in their market to care. Might doesn’t make right, but it may, this time, let Amazon get away with a monopolistic dictate.

Or maybe not. At the end of this blog, you’ll see Kathy’s list of more than 60 bloggers who are speaking out and spreading the word, along with her invitation for the rest of us to help spread the virus. Maybe Amazon.com isn’t inoculated against this blatant power grab’s effects after all.

For the full report from Angela in Writer’sWeekly, click here. For Kathy’s views, go to her blog by clicking here. Here’s her invitation:

I’d like to do my part by listing the 60+ references to this story. Feel free to grab the list below and add it to your own blog. If you want to add your post to the “cause”… the post a comment to this post. If you’ve got your own blog, copy this list and post it on your blog as well. The more links to these posts… the more “traction” this cause will get.


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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 11:57 am and is filed under Computer and Internet issues, Freedoms and civil liberties. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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6 Responses to “The King Kong of book sales makes a grab…”

  1. Jannique Says:
    April 2nd, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    Now I see a connection between amazon.com and Australian real estate agents! I hate this kind of behaviour…..Good luck with the whole virus action, I hope it will change things.

  2. Author Says:
    April 4th, 2008 at 1:10 pm

    Keep in mind what Amazon is trying to do, foist off on the public BookSurge, a POD printery they own, whose bad service and poor printing quality ensured that LightningSource became the market leader. Getting clients by using Amazon’s market share isn’t going to change that. BookSurge will still be inadequate. Amazon’s ethics will remain dubious.

    The POD community needs to get together and create a list of demands Amazon must meet before we sign, demands that ensure that customers receive quality books quickly and that Amazon doesn’t force book prices upward. They’d include:

    1. Since Amazon is handling every aspect of publishing from printing to shipping, Amazon must handle all defective returns. It must place a notice to that effect on the detail page of all BookSurge titles. It must make replacement easy with a widely publicized toll-free number. It must pay postage both ways. Replacements must ship within two weeks. Otherwise, as others have noted, authors and publishers will get blamed for BookSurges poor quality control.

    2. Since Amazon is doing the printing and selling, there’s no way authors and publishers can know how many copies are actually being sold. Amazon could print and sell 1000 copies and only pay for 800. To provide a way to check, Amazon must provide authors and publishers with weekly sales figures, listing the date and time a book is ordered and shipped as well as the city, state and zip where it is shipped. It must provide a legally binding scheme to allow us to examine their internal records any time a discrepancy appears.

    3. There is no need to stick authors and publishers with the cost of creating two books just to increase Amazon’s profitability. BookSurge must change their front end to accept precisely the same files as LightningSource. Until it does so, Amazon will continue to carry all POD books from Lightning.

    4. BookSurge can print in fewer formats and sizes than Lightning, so books in all the other formats will be supplied through Lightning. That will never change.

    5. Only Amazon benefits from this change, so Amazon will cover all the costs of placing books into BookSurge’s system and never charge for this service.

    6. Amazon must allow authors and publishers the same freedom to set prices and discounts as Lightning permits.

    7. Amazon will not attempt to force authors and publishers to sell them books at a greater discount than they offer other retail outlets. (Doing so is illegal anyway.) Authors and publishers will still be allow complete freedom in the discount they offer on their own titles.

    Other items need to be included, but you get the point. We don’t let Amazon run this show. We set down the conditions they must meet, conditions that ensure that the public is treated properly and we aren’t cheated. Will Amazon be willing to agree to these quite reasonable conditions. Almost certainly not.

    Legal action will take time. This is something we can do now to rally everyone to the same flag and keep BookSurge’s salesmen from wearing us down one by one. And this ought to make it clear to everyone that Amazon’s goal is more control and more profits. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they agree to quickly replace any book they misprinted and sold?

  3. Kathy Hendershot-Hurd Says:
    April 8th, 2008 at 11:03 pm

    Thanks for picking up the torch and fighting the good fight with me. I’m afraid those of us opposing Amazon are truly the small, underfunded Davids of the biblical story.

    The list has grown to over 100…. we’ll see if the momentum continues to build.

  4. Book Publishers Says:
    May 19th, 2008 at 8:00 pm

    Great Site. Keep up the great work.

  5. Bob Says:
    May 31st, 2008 at 3:54 pm

    Thanks. I understand the story’s not finished yet.

  6. Hot Water Solar Panels Says:
    June 4th, 2008 at 5:11 am

    Hot Water Solar Panels…

    I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you….

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