NY Center for Independent Publishing talks about Amazon and BookSurge
An interesting post on the NYCIP website about Amazon's insistence that POD publishers use BookSurge or stock copies of their books in Amazon's warehouse - Lloyd Jassin, the chair of NYCIP, has some rather odd assertions.The first is this: "Traditionally, bookselling was separated from publishing, with booksellers (including Amazon) realizing the benefit of combining the wares of many publishers." This actually is not accurate. Perhaps reflective of the last 20 years, but bookselling is a much older business than that, and I think many of us can remember Doubleday bookshops, Scribners bookshops, and the like. Bookshops started out as the front-of-the-store to printing presses. So to say that bookselling should adhere to "tradition" by separating itself from publishing is, to use Jassin's own term, "specious reasoning".
Jassin also predicts the following:
To which the only judicious response is: WTF?????If I had to guess, I'd say in the next 24-months Google buys Ingram (Googlegram?) for its digital group assets (including Lightning Source), and it out-Amazons Amazon by creating the ultimate digital warehouse/distributor in the sky.
If Google were to exhibit digital favoritism, it would steer book buyers to its wholly owned and super-efficient Lightning Source imprint. Amazon owns the online store. Google owns the web. Amazon merchandises books. Google sells them contextually. Balance is restored to the planet.
Ingram is a family-owned company that is doing extraordinarily well and always has, and which will definitely NOT sell off its digital group (which is a relatively new business for it) to Google even if such an offer were made. And a hostile acquisition would be seriously damaging to the business.
Jassin's an entertainment lawyer. He ends his piece by citing Napster. There are indeed many similarities between the music and publishing industries, but I think he needs to dwell a little more in the book world if he wants to make accurate assertions.
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