""They rationalize they can ship books faster. Our printer, Lightning Source, ships books to Amazon's customers directly, even using an Amazon.com return address sticker. They rationalize they can ship items together to save money, and that doing this saves transportation costs and fuel. What they don't tell you is that forcing a publisher to pay Amazon to print their book, plus setup fees for new books, plus 48% of each sale could and probably will mean higher list prices on books and, thus, less money in the customers' pockets, less money in the publishers' and authors' pockets...but more money in Amazon's pocket.""
""Notice they left out the setup fees ($50 for new titles), the printing costs, and the 48% they want from each sale. In fact, there's no mention of fees at all in the statement. They also don't mention that the average publishing package for authors at Booksurge is over $1,000.
Also, regarding the Advantage Program, they left out the fact that publishers/authors have to pay $29.95 per year, PLUS shipping costs to get the books to Amazon, PLUS 55% of each sale to Amazon. They don't seem too concerned with shipping and fuel expenses for this part of the statement, probably because the publisher has to pay for those.""
For the full article, please read it here.
What I'd like to know is what company is seeing the benefit of this charging system that will eat into any profit? It looks to me like they're charging the snot out of the Non-BS product. Why would they do that?
Easy. So they don't have to sell their competition on their own site. And that's fine with me, but come out and say it! Come out and say what you mean by this. Don't say it's for the environment, don't say it's to save fuel costs or time or anything but your bottom line.
ETA: This is very informative. Read the comments.
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What a huge gooey mess this is turning into. *sigh* It just doesn't pay to get outta bed some days, ya know?
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