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Deal Breaker? Amazon - BookSurge - POD - No Choice?

by Mark on March 28th, 2008

Duncan says: “Amazon has announced that it will only sell print-on-demand books printed by its own print-on-demand service BookSurge.”

I didn’t see his source for the announcement so I did a little digging…

Jumped over to Crunchbase and found a link to Techmeme then another link to paidContent and finally found reference there to WritersWeekly. I might have eliminated the middlemen had I known that Angela Hoy had commented on Duncan’s original post - but what do I know? lol…

Angela gets down to the nitty gritty of this deal, beginning with;

“BREAKING DEVELOPMENT: We were notified by a PublishAmerica author that her book was available for purchase through Amazon on Tuesday but today the “buy” button for her book on Amazon is gone. We researched some other PublishAmerica books and it appears the “buy” button on Amazon has indeed been removed from the vast majority of their book pages.“

Yeah, I suppose that would get your attention, wouldn’t it?

Quickly, Angela tells us;

“Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the ‘buy’ button on their Amazon.com book pages will be ‘turned off.’”

Anne, did you know there is a POD underground?

Angela was able to take this to a phone conversation with John Clifford of Amazon/BookSurge at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26, 2008. She mentioned to John “we heard a rumor that POD publishers who didn’t use BookSurge would have the ‘buy’ button on their Amazon.com book pages turned off.” In quite the “political” manner, John replied “What? Who told you that? That’s not true!”

Later, in the same conversation, he amended that when he “finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the ‘buy’ button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we’d heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives.”

Angela gives us quite a bit more in her article. I’d suggest giving it a good read. I’m not here to pass judgment, but this feels like it would make those using POD and selling at Amazon extremely uncomfortable not to mention the loss of profits.

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