{"id":6509,"date":"2008-04-02T17:09:39","date_gmt":"2008-04-02T23:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ncobrief.com\/index.php\/archives\/round-two-of-the-great-amazon-imbroglio\/"},"modified":"2008-04-02T19:20:41","modified_gmt":"2008-04-03T01:20:41","slug":"round-two-of-the-great-amazon-imbroglio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/archives\/round-two-of-the-great-amazon-imbroglio\/","title":{"rendered":"Round Two of the Great Amazon Imbroglio"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, this is getting interesting \u2013 last weekend the writing world \u2013 or that portion of it that doesn\u2019t have a name which frequents the New York Times best-sellers list – was all agog over Amazon.com\u2019s fiat that all books sold through Amazon must be printed by it\u2019s POD subsidiary, Booksurge. (Gruesome details here in my post of Sunday last<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Many of us ink-stained scribbling wretches are being advised to A-remain calm, it is not the end of the world as we know it and B- that Amazon doesn\u2019t own the bloody world yet, anyway so change over all of your links to Barnes and Noble and sit tight.<\/p>\n

Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly has the latest development here<\/a>; yes, a couple of POD firms have caved, given yesterdays deadline to stand and deliver, or else their authors \u2018 buy buttons\u2019 be disabled on Amazon\u2019s website. Angela has some shrewd guesses about why and how this is all going down the way that it is, as well as a link to further developments \u2013 and the cheery news that no buttons have actually been turned off or harmed in the making of this power-grab\/controversy.<\/p>\n

The Independent Authors\u2019 Guild<\/a> forum has been all of a twitter though: what would Ingram\/Lightning Source do about this? (Break out the terrible swift sword and start trampling those grapes of wrath, some of us hoped!<\/em>) How would the various POD firms react ? (Stand tall and tell \u2018em \u201cNuts!\u201d, <\/em>some of us hoped!) And how would the general public react? A volcanic outburst of rage would be nice, but perhaps a little much for us mere scribbling mortals to hope for. Some of us still have day jobs, you see, Although book-blogger PODdy Mouth has a nice takedown here<\/a>, including a number that can be called\u2026 <\/p>\n

OMG Amazon has a actual telephone number for people to talk to a real live human? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, OK, probably some poor barely-minimum-wage call center drone, so keep it civil and dignified, people. It isn\u2019t their fault; the guys whose f**king brilliant idea this was are well beyond being reached by a phone call. Maybe not beyond subpoena\u2026 eh, call me a dreamer. It goes with the territory, I write historical novels<\/a> and would like to make a living from it, for f**ks sake! Given that there are so many lawyer-bloggers, perhaps some searching analysis of whatever basis there might be for anti-trust action. All well and good; and this sort of controversy is bread, butter and circuses to the blogosphere.<\/p>\n

But I have long predicted that the towers of the literary industrial complex would totter, crumble and fall when a certain technological point was reached \u2013 when there was a desktop gadget that would print and bind a nice little paperback or hardbound book. Even if it was so expensive to buy that only places like Kinkos would have them, even if it could only crank them out one or two at a time, even at a cost per unit substantially above that of one of those industrial print shops that could churn out a thousand in a minute \u2013 it would mean the end of the literary-industrial complex. Anyone could take their book content and cover file, with ISBN and everything, down to the corner copy place, pay them to print and bind a couple or three or half-dozen copies of your book\u2026 and you could mail them to whoever had bought them. Or who you wanted to send them! That\u2019s the future, and according to this release<\/a>, may be here already, in the form of the Espresso Book Machine. Think of this as Ingram\/Lightning Source looking across the poker table with a steely gaze and saying, \u201craise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always been the holy grail of the book business to walk into a store and get any book,\u201d said Kirby Best, president and CEO of Lightning Source. With the signing of today\u2019s strategic agreement with On Demand Books, proprietor of the Espresso Book Machine, Best sees that goal coming a little bit closer.\u201d <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And savor the discription and call me a prophetess: \u201cWe\u2019re building a new machine that\u2019s much smaller that can be mass produced, version 2.0,\u201d said cofounder and chairman Jason Epstein. Neller adds that a beta machine, which will be the size of a copier at Kinko\u2019s (3\u2019 X 2-1\/2\u2019 for the finishing unit with another 2\u2019 for a duplex printer), will be ready in the fall. If all goes well, a less expensive model will begin leasing in 2009. \u201cThe point of this machine is to represent the ultimate in POD,\u201d said Epstein, who sees it as the best way to preserve backlist. If the machines catch on and proliferate like so many Starbucks outlets, the marketplace would become radically decentralized and book distribution would require simply an Internet connection.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

Oh, yeah\u2026 definitely we\u2019re into round two. Pass the popcorn. <\/p>\n

(Crossposted at the IAG Blog<\/a>)<\/p>\n

(And yeah, my blogosphere cover is now comprehensively blown – I blog under the name “Sgt Mom” and write books under the name “Celia Hayes”. <\/a>It turns out that someone<\/a> is already using my real name and has somewhat of a reputation under it. I understand that Elizabeth Taylor<\/a> had something of the same problem.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, this is getting interesting \u2013 last weekend the writing world \u2013 or that portion of it that doesn\u2019t have a name which frequents the New York Times best-sellers list – was all agog over Amazon.com\u2019s fiat that all books sold through Amazon must be printed by it\u2019s POD subsidiary, Booksurge. (Gruesome details here in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,71,1,75,5,25,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aint-that-america","category-fun-and-games","category-general","category-literary-good-stuff","category-media-matters-not","category-technology","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}