If Amazon won’t back down, one solution may be to sell one’s POD book via multiple printing services, e.g. LSI from your own site, and BookSurge from Amazon. A pain.

Here’s the info from the Author’s Guild:

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“Amazon Tightens Grip on Long Tail”

Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all books that it sells that are produced through on-demand means be printed by BookSurge, their in-house on-demand printer/publisher. Amazon pitched this as a customer service matter, a means for more speedily delivering print-on-demand books and allowing for the bundling of shipments with other items purchased at the same time from Amazon. It also put a bit of an environmental spin on the move — claiming less transportation fuel is used (this is unlikely, but that’s another story) when all items are shipped directly from Amazon.

We, and many others, think something else is afoot. Ingram Industries’ Lightning Source is currently the dominant printer for on-demand titles, and they appear to be quite efficient at their task. They ship on-demand titles shortly after they are ordered through Amazon directly to the customer. It’s a nice business for Ingram, since they get a percentage of the sales and a printing fee for every on-demand book they ship. Amazon would be foolish not to covet that business.

What’s the rub? Once Amazon owns the supply chain, it has effective control of much of the “long tail” of publishing — the enormous number of titles that sell in low volumes but which, in aggregate, make a lot of money for the aggregator. Since Amazon has a firm grip on the retailing of these books (it’s uneconomic for physical book stores to stock many of these titles), owning the supply chain would allow it to easily increase its profit margins on these books: it need only insist on buying at a deeper discount — or it can choose to charge more for its printing of the books — to increase its profits. Most publishers could do little but grumble and comply.

We suspect this maneuver by Amazon is far more about profit margin than it is about customer service or fossil fuels. The potential big losers (other than Ingram) if Amazon does impose greater discounts on the industry, are authors — since many are paid for on-demand sales based on the publisher’s gross revenues — and publishers.

We’re reviewing the antitrust and other legal implications of Amazon’s bold move. If you have any information on this matter that you think could be helpful to us, please call us at (212) 563-5904 and ask for the legal services department, or send an e-mail to staff@authorsguild.org.

Feel free to post or forward this message in its entirety.

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Copyright 2008, The Authors Guild. The Authors Guild (www.authorsguild.org) is the nation’s largest society of published book authors.

I think POD is hopeless unless you are able to promote yourself very heavily.

I’d rather offer half a PDF file for free download and charge for downloading the other half. That would be an interesting experiment, with his huge readership. But I have this sneaking feeling that no one would actually pay for the second half, and then I would be really depressed.

I tend to think that writing is going to go through a kind of Golden Dark Age, golden in that everything ever written will be available free, dark in that no one new will be learning “the craft” with any diligence and the supply of new text will degenerate to a huge mass of half-baked commentary. After 50 to 100 years, maybe writing will re-emerge somehow as a fine art.

See, so long as there were gatekeepers (editors) restricting access to the means of publishing, writers had to compete to satisfy the editors, who coudl enforce standards. Also there was the incentive to get paid. But if there are no gatekeepers anymore, you end up with something so egalitarian, writing will degenerate to the textual equivalent of travel photos and videos of a cat playing the piano. I see nothing that can be done about this, and I think you should follow Microsoft’s example when Bill G suddenly understood the Net: “We will recognize existing standards and extend them.” I think we have no other choice alas.

Of course niche publishing for eccentrics who like to buy books will still exist, just the same as oil lamps still exist for people in cabins who don’t like the purple color of battery-powered white LEDs, and logs still exist for people who like to watch burning wood instead of enjoying the silent comfort of forced air heating. But niche-anything has never interested me much.

Soooo, I like paper. Don’t get me wrong. Ebooks seem really cool. I love Flurb! But my eyes really love print. And the rest of me loves being able to put a paperback in my coat pocket and just zooming off somewhere to read. Someday I’m sure there will be a Kindle that’s just right. I don’t think it’s here yet, though.

So, I guess whatever it takes to get these works on paper is what I’ll get behind. It looks like Cory sketched out most of this particular hydra’s characteristics. And shoot, the timing might be just right with all these rebate checks flowing from the guvment this summer, eh?

1. Producing ebooks from older books for which you lack digital files

2. Turning the ebooks into decent page-layouts that can be sent to a POD press

3. Finding a POD printer

4. Promoting the POD books

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1. Producing ebooks from older books for which you lack digital files

Scribd has a new deal whereby they’ll turn any pile of paper that you’re willing to CC license into a digital, OCR’ed page. Theoretically, there’s a long wait, but you might talk to them about getting priority, given your profile.

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2. Turning the ebooks into decent page-layouts that can be sent to a POD press

This is a reader competition if ever I saw one. Put the word out, put up a painting or two as a prize and see who’ll typeset for you the best.

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3. Finding a POD printer

I’m more of a Lulu than Amazon man here. The big downside of Lulu is…no Amazon distribution. That means that someone who does an author-search on AMZN won’t see your books. It also means that bloggers can’t get AMZN affiliate $$ from copies of your books.

OTOH, as Damon Knight used to say, “Money flows towards the writer.” Spending upfront dough to put your books back into print sucks.

OTOH — reader contest! Run polls, ask your readers to put up dough for the setup costs, put everyone who donates into the acknowledgments and offer them exclusive access to a little limited edition chapbook you run off at your local copyshop.

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4. Promoting the POD books

CC licenses. Solicit donations for the ebooks from people who don’t want to buy the PODs. Put ‘em in your next Tor book.

(PS: Isabel sent us the prototype for our wedding ring today and IT IS SO FREAKING COOL!)

I’m really groping here. I have a sense that the old publishing paradigm is on its way down the toilet…which is why I think more and more about staring my own press and doing my reprints myself. Then I could keep the costs per book down. And it’s nice not to go hat in hand to a publisher…

That’s why I started my own SF webzine FLURB! If I had my own press, I could maybe reissue Wm. Craddock’s BE NOT CONTENT, too…

My current sense of reprints of old SF books is that ebooks are really a waste of time, and one might as well go the Doctorow route: give away the ebooks and offer the POD as, basically, a cheap printing service for those who want hard copies of your old books.

Something working in my favor if I were to start a press is that my daughter Georgia is a professional graphic designer http://www.grfix.com, and my son Rudy runs an internet service provider http://www.monkeybrains.net So I can get design and web space without great expense.

I’m working on painting a cover for SPACETIME DONUTS today.