Thanks to Veinglory over at PodPeep again for bringing this letter from Amazon to our attention in regards to the recent matter addressed in my previous post about Amazon monopolizing the POD printing industry by requiring all POD publishers to use their BookSurge company for printing or the BUY button of their books would be taken down. Amazon states their overall goal by doing this is to improve the customer experience! This coming from a company who won’t even publish their phone number on their own website, by the way.
Amazon claims it can print and bind a book on site in its facility in about 2 hours (yeah, I’m sure that’s quality), allowing it to be married with multiple purchases made at the same time by a single customer and they can all ship together at once. This will help to save shipping costs and fuel. I wonder if this savings will be passed on to the customer? It’s true. Amazon does already offer free shipping on orders over $25.00, but that doesn’t mean they ship your items the same day. It also doesn’t mean they use a preferred method like UPS or Fedex. I seem to recall a multi-item purchase I made once that took 7 days before they shipped it, and they shipped it in two boxes days apart from one another using the postal service although all the items shipped from their Kentucky warehouse. 14 days later I got one box, and the other arrived a few days afterward. I would have received the items in 3 days had I just paid the shipping. Amazon might have saved here, but I certainly didn’t.
I wonder if this means they actually have Booksurge printing facilities in every single warehouse? How much money will they spend on programming to make sure your POD book purchase actually prints in the same warehouse where your other items are in stock to ship? Will they pass on that fuel and shipping cost savings to the POD publishers, or charge them an ungodly fee for file uploads, storage, and PRINTING!? If the publishers get hit, you can bet that will then increase the fees bestowed upon the author, and probably the pricing of the actual books as well.
True, Amazon claims you can continue to print your books as you like and just ship them about 5 to keep on hand to fulfill orders. Hmm..an excellent way to slap POD publishers with a storage fee, inventory upkeep fee, receiving fee, etc. So, Amazon saves on shipping and fuel, and makes money by charging POD publishers like crazy for their service! It will be interesting to see if Booksurge soon becomes the preferred method chosen by POD authors and/or who will be the first POD publisher to go belly up (if any).
For now, Amazon is no longer my preferred method for shopping!