Archives for online book retailers

Comparison of major Print On Demand (POD) Services

 

Book Store

Book Store


BooksandTales
has done a tremendous job of researching POD services, screening their author contracts, finding out their fees and contracts for a variety of services, the type of books (e-books, soft cover, hard cover), their way of distributing books among other things.
I am sure it took them months to compile this work – and it is free for you, posted on their website

But, nevertheless that it is an amazing work of comparison and a great service for authors, it contains a major flaw: They call it: “Publisher” Index: A head to head comparison of major Print On Demand (POD) “publishers.”

POD is not publishing – it is a service!  
And calling POD companies publishers is absolutely wrong.  And to talk about royalties is wrong too – even if these service providers themselves call it royalties. They all let the author pay (mostly heavily inflated prices) for the production of books and then take a hefty commission for every book sold – even the work is minor (loading e-books up to online retailers or to distributors, or sell them through their own website).

This is not publishing at all.  A publishing house is a company that screens manuscripts extremely carefully, and if it is of outstanding quality and fitting into the publishers program, they offer a contract to the author, pay an advance on the royalty and start the tedious work of editing and producing the book. None of this is done by POD companies, editing is only sometimes offered for a hefty fee.  So please: Don’t call it publishing if it is anything but. The term publisher or publishing should have trademark protection.

http://www.booksandtales.com/pod/