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….

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

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?