Patrick Henry's comment to Jean-Marie Hershey's blog post on Amazon.com's BookSurge unit move to shutout competing print on-demand companies by disabling the ability for "POD publishers" to directly sell books in the Amazon.com store has been spot on so far. Henry stated, "Amazon’s decision ought to provoke a reaction as vigorous as the one that greeted Adobe when it embedded the “Send to FedEx Kinko’s” button in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat."
And it has, WritersWeekly.com has been keeping tabs on coverage of event. There are 76 newspaper and blog articles today as of 12:21 AM Eastern. With 11 active forum discussions.
With no official statements from BookSurge or Lightning Source a lot being written is speculation.
Printing Industry analyst Heidi Tolliver-Nigro comments on call she had with Lighting Source, "I called Lighting Source (through whom I print all of my company’s books) this morning to ask about the issue and was told flatly “not to worry about it,” that LSI customers would be getting a letter on the issue shortly. Apparently, there is a clash of lawyers going on even as we speak."
Clash of the lawyers, and of the muscle. It's unclear if any long-term contracts exist between Amazon and print on-demnd printers such as Lighting Source. But even without contracts Lighting Source has a lot of distribution muscle to flex through their parent company Ingram Book Group who are responsible for drop shipping a lot of books sold by Amazon.com
Within a few days this issue will be resolved with Amazon.com and BookSurge reversing their decision to block Lighting Source and other print on-demand providers.
Discussion
By Heidi Tolliver-Nigro on Apr 01, 2008
I got my official letter from Lightning Source this evening. I'll post it here, but in essence, it says nothing. In a nutshell, they said, "We're monitoring it." Here's the text of the letter: # # # Dear Customer, Lightning Source has been following the recent press coverage and discussions about Amazon.com and BookSurge. We are aware of the concern this is causing the publishing community. The issue centers around Amazon.com tying the availability of your books and terms of sale at Amazon.com to the production of books at the Amazon.com subsidiary BookSurge, specifically requiring you to use BookSurge in order to sell on Amazon. Like you, we are very concerned about any conduct that would serve to limit a publishers choice in supply chain partners and to negatively impact the cost of your products to consumers. We believe that choice and selection of best of class services are critical to the long term success of publishers and a vibrant book market. Lightning Source continues to provide the highest quality digital on demand print and distribution services for every one of our customers. All your titles continue to be available to all of our channel partners, including Amazon.com, with immediate availability for shipment within 24 hours. We are committed to providing you with the best of class quality product and fastest distribution service in the market, and will continually work to develop new channels and new offerings. Lightning Source will continue to monitor this situation and let you know when we have more information. Please feel free to call your Lightning Source point of contact, if you have any additional questions. J. Kirby Best President & CEO Lightning Source Inc. # # # Heidi Tolliver-Nigro
Discussion
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