Below is taken from Publisher’s Weekly on-line.   

Amazon has sent an open letter to “interested parties,” explaining “what we’re changing with print on demand and why we are doing so.” Amazon has caused a major stir in the pod field with its decision to have publishers who want to sell pod titles directly through its Web site use its BookSurge pod subsidiary. And late Monday afternoon, Ingram, parent company of BookSurge rival Lightning Source, issued a statement from John Ingram noting the concerns it has fielded from publishers about Amazon’s actions.

In the letter from the Amazon.com books team, the company reiterated that by using machines that are located in its own fulfillment centers, Amazon can have a title ready for shipment quicker than if it needs to wait for a book to be shipped to its facility. The extra time will permit Amazon to “marry” a title with another product that will be shipped in the same box, in most cases hitting Amazon Prime shipping times. “It isn’t logical or efficient to print a POD book in a third place, and then physically ship the book to our fulfillment centers. It makes more sense to produce the books on site, saving transportation costs and transportation fuel, and significantly speeding the shipment to our customers,” the letter states.

Amazon further notes that if publishers do not want to use BookSurge for pod, they can still sell their titles through the e-tailer as part of it Advantage Program, provided they pre-produce five copies of each title that Amazon will stock in its warehouse. Publishers can also use Amazon’s third party marketplace option to list titles. Amazon is not requiring that pod titles be printed exclusively through BookSurge.

Amazon closed the letter by stating that it will only reconsider the policy “if we can find a better way to serve customers faster.” The company noted that while some of its earlier initiatives “caused consternation at times,” it has stuck with changes that it believed are good for customers. Amazon cited its decision to provide customer reviews on the site as one that was initially criticized by many publishers, but which led to more sales. A second controversial move, which caused “significant consternation,” was Amazon’s decision to sell used books along side new editions. Despite lots of protest, Amazon notes it “stood by the decision because we were convinced it was right for customers.”

In his statement, John Ingram said that while “the questions that are being raised about Amazon.com and its Booksurge division don’t directly relate to Ingram – either Lightning Source Inc. or Ingram Book Group – it clearly is alarming many of our publisher partners.” According to John Ingram, “publishers are telling us they feel Amazon.com’s actions are not appropriate.” John Ingram’s statement adds that the company has been unable to get a direct response from Amazon about its pod shift.

“We all live in a world where decisions are made about insourcing and outsourcing, and free choice is important,” the statement continues. “At Ingram Book and Lightning Source, we are going to work really hard to continue to be the compelling choice as publishers make their outsourcing decisions. Our breadth of distribution channels including the online retailers remains the same, and Ingram still provides one day turnaround in the fulfillment of orders for books including print on demand titles.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: More and more small presses are utilizing POD services to publish books as publishers can acquire short runs and maintain smaller inventories to supply their websites and for order fulfillment, while providing greater general accessibility of titles, thus keeping them in-print longer (if authors find the arrangement beneficial), while reducing costs of warehousing and the headaches of finding good distributors who pay on time, etc. 

The industry is changing. Many of these changes were forced by punitive inventory laws which compelled publishers to invest in books with a quick turnover rate and then allowed to go out of print or remaindered. This is not a workable model for literary work, which often require longer periods of time to reach break-even. Almost all the supporting independent publisher organizations are geared toward the marketing of non-fiction books and have little creative ideas for literary publishers to help keep them afloat, so POD may well be the only tool literary publishers will have to sustain their operations.

There is still much bias in the field in regard to POD production and confusion about self-publishing and vanity publishing versus literary presses utilizing the production strategy to remain viable in a shrinking market. Literary presses, in particular, are increasingly moving toward this option or even developing their own POD capabilities and marketing primarily through their websites. Wordcraft of Oregon, for instance, acquired perfectbinding equipment, high speed laser printers, scoring and cutting capabilities, so we could produce small books in our office that were competitive in price and production standards, but larger books — such as novels and story collections — require the much more expensive inventory production model with larger runs (1,000 or more) or the alternative of the POD short run strategy.

POD books if well-designed can be very nice books that look as good as anything being produced by inventory printing. The only problem I’ve run into with POD production is occasional spillover of glue in the binding which does not allow the back cover to lie perfectly flat. I have this same issue with books I perfectbind in the office, but I’ve learned this is primarily because of over-glueing and adjust my own process. But the product of POD services such as Lightning Source has improved immensely over the last few years. 

Wordcraft of Oregon, because of our prior experience with inventory publishing, maintains an Amazon Advantage membership so even if we produce a POD book and if Amazon declines to accept POD titles from Lightning Source, we could still send copies to Amazon under that program to be included in their on-line catalog. The tradeoff with the Advantage program is that you gain competitive standing with quicker order fulfillment (within 24 hours) but at the cost of any profitability for the publisher – a publisher provides not only the standard 55% distributor discount, but must pay shipping to deliver copies to the Amazon fulfillment center in Lexington, Kentuck – and they often re-order single copies. A single copy of a novel-sized book at media book rate is currently $2.13 (and will be going up again). If you use media book rate and sent five copies, the publisher cost per book would allow at least for some small profit. 

More on this in my next blog.

David Memmott, Editor

Tags: Publishing News

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Editor's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.