While most of the article seemed more subjective than objective, this was intriguing:
Quote:
In March 2008, Amazon informed many small and medium sized presses using POD that, if they wanted their books listed and sold through Amazon, they would have to use a company called BookSurge for their printing. It’s probably no surprise that BookSurge had been purchased by Amazon in 2005. The initial communication from Amazon was though highly deniable channels, phone calls, mostly, and some carefully phrased emails. When word of it got out, there was a huge outcry on the part of publishers and authors. Federal anti-trust agencies got involved and there was a major lawsuit that dragged on for years. The end result was that Amazon backed off (though they continued to hold people to contracts that had been signed because of their threats), the suit was settled out of court, and things were back to normal. Oh, and Amazon changed the name from BookSurge to CreateSpace to get away from the bad publicity.
|