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PW has Ingram statement on Amazon/Booksurge mess

Amazon Explains POD Move; Ingram Raises Questions - 3/31/2008 1:56:00 PM - Publishers Weekly

In his statement, John Ingram said that while “the questions that are being raised about Amazon.com and its Booksurge division don’t directly relate to Ingram - either Lightning Source Inc. or Ingram Book Group - it clearly is alarming many of our publisher partners.” According to John Ingram, “publishers are telling us they feel Amazon.com’s actions are not appropriate.” John Ingram’s statement adds that the company has been unable to get a direct response from Amazon about its pod shift.

“We all live in a world where decisions are made about insourcing and outsourcing, and free choice is important,” the statement continues. “At Ingram Book and Lightning Source, we are going to work really hard to continue to be the compelling choice as publishers make their outsourcing decisions. Our breadth of distribution channels including the online retailers remains the same, and Ingram still provides one day turnaround in the fulfillment of orders for books including print on demand titles.”

Good for PW, getting Ingram to weigh in.  LSI can still deliver every one of its 400,000 titles to Amazon in 24 hours.

The news story is really:

Amazon to readers: we’re removing a huge chunk of our catalog.

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Full text of Amazon’s PR statement re Booksurge

Amazon.com–Print on Demand

Open letter to interested parties:

We wanted to make sure those who are interested have an opportunity to understand what we’re changing with print on demand and why we’re doing so.

One question that we’ve seen is a simple one. Is Amazon requiring that print-on-demand books be printed inside Amazon’s own fulfillment centers, and if so why?

Yes.

Full bumpf available here

Amazon: you are a technology company. Do not make publishers reformat their entire backlist to conform to Booksurge specs. It is patently unreasonable to ask publishers to reformat thousands of books into Booksurge’s proprietary spec format. If you want to “own” POD, then man up and do the work. Or better yet, do a deal with LSI to put LSI machines in your fulfillment centers.

Amazon: what happened to your promise of  being “the world’s greatest bookstore?”. Are you seriously telling your own customers that if a POD book takes 24 hours to ship to you, it is too hard for you to acquire it for your customers?

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