Response From Amazon re BookSurge
July 17, 2008 by Anne Wayman
Filed under Jobs
Most of you will remember I sent a letter to Jeff Bezos as part of my response to SPAN’s decision to back Angela Hoy’s BookLocker suit against the giant etailer.
Yesterday or the day before, an email wandered in in response. Here it is in part:
Hello from Amazon.com.
My name is Peg Anderson of Amazon.com’s Executive Customer Relations. Jeff Bezos received your e-mail and has asked me to reply on his behalf.
Given your interest in Amazon Print On Demand, I want to make sure that you had an opportunity to read a letter we published about what we’re changing and why.
The full text of the letter is posted on our website here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000213141
(The email then repeats the linked letter.)
Regards,Peg Anderson
Executive Customer Relations
Amazon.comhttp://www.amazon.com
Don’t you just love corporate-speak? I mean Jeff may have seen a pile of letters, mine included, but I truly doubt he personally read it.
I also suspect Peg’s letter is canned and that thousands went out like it. Which is fine; I just wish everyone would admit what everyone knows. If the number of people emailing gets big enough, Amazon may have to re-think it’s policy in spite of it’s stated reluctance to do so.
Besides, there’s a serious flaw in Amazon’s argument. There’s nothing inherent in the POD process that requires a single publisher. Amazon could agree to print anyone’s book in their shops. See Instabook which is designed for just that, although in brick-and-mortar stores.
Which I why I’m suspicious. Besides, I really believe the process of printing books and selling books should have some separation just to assure variety and fairness.
Write well and often,
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“Amazon could agree to print anyone’s book in their shops.”
Anne,
I’m not surprised you aren’t aware of the facts, because the furor initially generated on this issue was rather short of them.
Printing the books in-house is precisely what Amazon wants to do. They have installed digital printing presses in their main warehouses for that very purpose.
HOWEVER, unless and until they have legal permission to do so, they can’t. In order to have that legal permission, the publishers–that is, those who have signed contracts with authors giving them the right to reproduce the book for sale–need to be signed with Booksurge, which is the arm of Amazon that handles on-demand printing.
It has nothing to do with a desire by Amazon to “monopolize” POD printing. As they’ve stated repeatedly, those who don’t want to sign with Booksurge are welcome to use the two other available Amazon channels: Advantage and Marketplace. They just won’t get free shipping, and it will cost them more because the percentage Amazon requires is higher and there are additional expenses.
Once a title is listed with Booksurge, Amazon can then print a copy right in the warehouse when it’s purchased and ship it along with whatever else the customer has ordered. Before, if the book was with LSI, that meant paying for two shipments: one from the Amazon warehouse and one from LSI. Amazon loses money on their free shipping as it is. Always has. Is it really so awful they’d want to find a way to save a few bucks?
And when you consider many of those who screamed the loudest were short-discounting–giving less than the standard 40%–that meant Amazon was taking an even bigger hit.
A company has every right to maximize their revenues and cut their cost of doing business. To hear some of the protests, one would think people were under the misapprehension Amazon existed to do digitally printed authors a favor by selling their books no matter how little Amazon made on the sale–or how much they lost.
Wrong.