Publishing; But Not As We Know It

June 9th, 2008 |

There has been, for the past few weeks, several spats going on over the news that Amazon US now wants POD publishers to use their Booksurge service for printing or lose the ‘Buy Now’ button on their web site.

Yesterday I noticed this in the Sunday Herald; basically a UK publisher standing up to Amazon by way of telling them to get stuffed over their demand for greater discounts.

The way I understand publishing to work is that there is a printing price, a royalty for the author and a fulfillment price; this is what the retailer takes for selling the work. If a book costs £3.99 to print and the author royalty is set at £1.00 this makes the fulfillment £3.00 on a book costing £7.99. Where do you discount? Print more copies thereby bringing down the first price or make the authors royalty smaller. And then there are ‘returns’

Two problems here: If you print more it ‘costs’ more; paper, transport, environmental damage (returns are often just incinerated). If you reduce the royalty the author suffers.

Is the way forward to be e-books via the Kindle or the Sony reader? Probably not as figures show that most people prefer a paper book and POD is now cheaper than standard printing for runs of fewer than 1,200 copies.

Back before 1995 we had something called the Net Book Agreement. I suggest we return to it.

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