Mouths Are Moving and BookSurge Troops Are Marching..

Folks, the word is starting to spread about Amazon and their stronghold on the POD community. Here are recent comments from the LuLu Forums.

"It is unclear at this point whether Amazon is directing its strong arm at all pod publishers, which would include thousands of small presses, or if they are targeting the major self-publishing venues in particular. Still no comments from Lulu I see.

Anyway, yes, this will have an unpleasant impact on the authors specifically -- authors who are struggling as it is:

Formatting files twice if they want mainstream distribution and distribution with Amazon.
Pod venues that have wizards for formatting assistance would need to make substantial upgrades. Not to mention conversion of all their existing files -- time, manpower = $$$$$
The cost increases to support, in essence what would be double distribution, would have to pass onto the author in some fashion or another.

Or Amazon could realize the damage that this will do in the long run and rethink the entire greedy and ludicrous idea, which is what this seems to be about anyway, greed and monopoly.

I would very much like to here Lulu management's take on this.

But, in any event, I am certain that the blogs will be lit up about this for some time to come, hopefully we will know soon enough how bad the fallout is going to be for us authors."

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It has been confirmed in a Wall Street Journal article that Amazon.com is doing this.

They have the following regarding Lulu:

Publishers will "have to abide by Amazon's pricing," said Bob Young, CEO of Lulu Inc, a print-on-demand publisher based in Raleigh, N.C. Mr. Young said he believed BookSurge's prices to be "slightly higher" than other printers. An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on that issue.

"A significant number of our authors do request for their books to be available on Amazon," said Mr. Young, who hasn't yet decided whether he will agree to Amazon's terms.


Hopefully we will hear something official from Lulu regarding this. What would work out the best would be for them to find a way to offer authors the option of LSI distribution which will get you into Ingram or BookSurge which will get you into Amazon.com and Baker and Taylor as well as a package where you can get into both (admittedly this will probably cost more money as Lulu will have to pay for set up in two different systems - but hopefully it won't be too much more).

More chatter on this -