Robber Baron, Anyone?
Hm. Thanks to HutchO for bringing this to my attention–I have completely missed it. Apparently Amazon.com is telling POD publishers that Amazon won’t sell their books–unless said books are printed through Amazon’s POD subsidiary, BookSurge.
Here’s a Publisher’s Weekly short on it, and a couple more here and here.
Not all print on demand publishers are crap. A lot of small publishers (Samhain, ImaJinn, who I publish through, and I think Ellora’s Cave, even) use the POD model so they can make money to pay their authors. Print-on-demand has a smaller margin, which means the presses can offer competitive royalties to their authors–and, not so incidentally, stay in business.
The cost of distributing through one of the big companies–like, say, Ingram–can be prohibitive. If a bunch of small presses go through a POD service like Lightning Source, they effectively share the cost of distribution and simultaneously cut down on overhead. This cut in overhead and distribution costs means more small presses survive. I suppose to a certain extent that means more drek, but to be honest, the proportion of drek to good writing is about constant everywhere. (I believe that is part of Sturgeon’s Law.) More small indie presses are a good thing for the health of the publishing industry AND for your reading pleasure.
Amazon’s move is Microsoft-esque. I suppose sooner or later they were going to get big enough to start wanting to squash smaller businesses.
Why should you care? Well, a wider array of small presses provides you the reader with a wide selection of products to choose from, places to spend your money and shape the industry–as well as the customer’s ultimate bargaining power of Choosing Where To Spend Your Dime. Writers can go into the indie-house end of the publishing pool to wet their feet or occasionally to try out a different genre. And there’s the not-so-inconsiderable pleasure behind telling what is obviously a Big Company Trying To Squash Someone where to stick it.
So, dear Readers…what do you think?
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