BookSurge was acquired by Amazon in April of 2005 (I thought it was 2006; sorry about that).
At BookExpo America last May, BookSurge announced agreements with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Princeton University Press, Lexis Nexis, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Springer, Gale, and Kensington, among others, to ” use BookSurge’s Print on Demand service to make their current, backlist, out-of-print and large print books available to millions of customers on Amazon.com and through other distribution channels.”
Then in June, BookSurge and Kirtas, a company that digitizes print works, “announced a collaboration with universities and public libraries to preserve thousands of rare and inaccessible books from their collections and distribute them via BookSurge’s Print-on-Demand service. This collaboration, which will greatly enhance the selection of rare and historic books for sale on Amazon.com and other retail channels, represents a breakthrough approach to digitization and preservation that will ensure the public will have access to these works indefinitely via Print on Demand.”
I think the current tactics by Amazon are an attempt to expand these collaborations, not to punish small publishers. It’s entirely possible that whoever made the decisions and directed their implementation simply didn’t understand that online POD presses are the ones who would be the most affected, and that they’d have no problem complaining about it. Loudly.
Obviously I could be completely, utterly wrong about this. But as I said, it doesn’t make sense to me that Amazon would deliberately alienate small publishers; it seems far more likely to me that they were giving bigger publishers an ultimatum and instituted a one-size-fits all policy. We’ll see; I suspect there will be more announcements on Monday.
