The Vanity Book Surge

In a guest editorial in Publishers Weekly in August 2005, I speculated on the meaning of amazon.com’s acquisition of a small and struggling print on demand company called BookSurge. The most obvious benefit to Amazon, it seemed to me, was to short-circuit the inefficient system by which Amazon distributes books. Instead of shipping hard copies to Amazon, publishers could simply email their production files to the distribution giant, which would then manufacture them at BookSurge and mail them directly to customers. “The Web retailer still owns well over four million square feet of warehouse space, no small portion of which is devoted to books; it employs 9,000 people to process orders,” I wrote. “Imagine how Amazon would benefit if it could forward orders to a printer to drop-ship books directly to customers.”

So far, Amazon has not used its POD printer that way, and I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. The concept is simply too radical for an industry whose feet are cemented to the bedrock of a traditional distribution system driven by trucks rather than electrons. But I must admit to having been taken off guard by an article in the September 10, 2007 issue of Publishers Weekly entitled, “Amazon Tries Self-Publishing.” The article reports the launch of Amazon’s online self-publishing service, Books on Demand, and of course the operation is built around BookSurge.

Self-publication was among the very first applications entrepreneurs thought of after the Digital Revolution took off in the late 1990’s. And it was among the most profitable. It still is, and little wonder. The ratio of unpublished-to-published books in this country has always been about 20,000 to 1, and, if submissions to publisher and literary agency slush piles are any indication, that figure hasn’t changed. Authors desperate to have their voices heard simply cannot penetrate the gates of taste, literary judgment, and commerciality guarded by editors, agents, reviewers, and bookstore managers in the traditional trade book industry. So, they seek alternate pathways. Subsidy publication has always been an option for authors but remained an expensive luxury until technological advances brought the costs down to a proletarian level at the end of the 20th century. A lot of smart business people made fortunes capitalizing on that unsatisfied demand. And now Amazon is going to make one, too.

As both a literary agent and publisher I candidly confess to being one of those gatekeepers. I also candidly confess to being tormented by envy that I’m not among those who got stinking rich on the backs of vain authors. It’s just that, every time the inclination whispered seductively to me, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s not merely pride in being a gatekeeper that motivates me, though. It’s also the fact that a flood of self-published books, whether good or lousy, compromises the public’s ability to make intelligent selections. In the long run, the distinction between quality and crap will disappear and Gresham’s Law must take over. In the 1558 Thomas Gresham wrote, "When there is a legal tender currency, bad money drives good money out of circulation."

Amazon will make lots of money, bad and good, on Books on Demand, just as it does on a used book program that deprives authors of royalties on secondary sales of their books. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," said Ecclesiastes, and one version of the Bible translates the original Hebrew as, "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless."

We look to books for meaning, but the torrent of them surging our way from Amazon’s Books on Demand will surely make it harder to find it.

PS: Underscoring my comments about vanity publishing comes news that self-publisher AuthorHouse has acquired its competitor, iUniverse (reported at Publishers Weekly). The price wasn’t disclosed but with iUniverse publishing about 400 books a month and AuthorHouse 500-600, you have to figure that Bertram Capital, AuthorHouse’s backer, expects a windfall on humanity’s desperate need to tell a story.

- Richard Curtis