Amazon's threat to pod publishers in the US
Over the weekend, there was a tremendous amount of traffic on the self-publishing and Yahoo groups to which I belong. At first, due to my playground sense of humour (I do have others by the way), I suspected this might be an elaborate April Fool's joke. But now it would appear to be true. Amazon contacted a number of US small presses and self-publishers to say that if they didn't use Amazon's in house print on demand wing called BookSurge then the "Buy" buttons on the Amazon page for their books will be removed. They could then only sell their books on Amazon through a third party. Word quickly spread among the small presses and self-publishers who had been approached with this “offer they couldn’t refuse.” Approaches seemed to have been made by phone call with nothing in writing. It was all very mysterious and I couldn’t help feel that somebody was (successfully) winding an awful lot of people up. For many, BookSurge is not the first choice of printer for print ...