The Modern Journalist

Amazon to Print-On-Demand Publishers: Suck It.

I’ve been tinkering around with print-on-demand publishing since 2005. John and I have discussed publishing our next book ourselves, instead of going through the process of giving away our copyright (and trying to regain it, which we are doing with McGraw-Hill right now).

The POD technologies are advanced enough now that anyone with a little design know-how can lay out a book in short order and have it up for sale on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles and a host of other services. It’s quite great for the micro-media types who have decent followers. If you do the design yourself, you can make as much money as good mid-sized advance by selling around 1500 books, hardly a huge barrier to entry.

Amazon is trying to strong arm POD publishers, though, by forcing them to go through Amazon’s own service. In other words, if you want you books sold through Amazon.com, you need to dump your current POD provider and move over to Amazon’s POD service.

Three words: WTF.

These types of strong arm tactics will likely backfire on Amazon. The POD camp is growing quickly. There are millions of books sold on-demand these days, and if Barnes and Nobles is smart, they will immediately capitalize on this snafu and aggressively court consumers by offering them a wide range of choices for publication.

The POD marketing is going to be one of the most innovative for newspapers and other print publications as soon as they realize why people enjoy books. There’s a certain upscale, majestic feel to them particularly as we move into a world with haptics replacing real feeling and digital replacing words on a page.

The idea of a book becomes a lifestyle choice, like the iPod. Packaging your words into an editor-selected group of stories that can be purchased online — and even better, allowing users to self-create their own materials — will be easy money for these publications.

Which makes Amazon’s move all the more silly, unless they are trying to position themselves only for the big companies. Maybe they’ve already started in talks.

Even that doesn’t make sense though. Do your deals with the big companies and continue to collect your micro-fees with the "free" public, who can use whichever service they choose.