Eszter’s Amazon Price Discrimination post generated some heat and also light. Clearly folks are fascinated by how it all works. (I am.) So here’s something: Aaron Shepard, author of Aiming At Amazon, has posted the draft of the 2nd edition as a free PDF download (here’s the blog link; here’s a direct link to the zip file itself.)

What’s it about? I’ll quote the subtitle: ‘the NEW business of self-publishing – or – how to publish books for profit with print on demand by Lightning Source and book marketing on Amazon.’ That’s pretty narrow, so maybe you don’t care. If you do think that might be interesting, I’d say it’s a good book, and an excellent how-to. If you want a practical step-by-step to starting your own micro-publishing business, he’s got the blueprint. If that’s not for you, it’s still interesting. For example, he has smart things to say about Amazon’s apparently hair-raisingly ruthless attempts to stamp out the POD competition. (If you don’t know about that, you could start here, then graduate to reading the actual legal complaint here. It’s an ongoing class action suit.) Shepard doesn’t deny that Amazon is ruthless but he takes a small-fish-can-still-swim-here line. I’ll quote from his blog (presumably he doesn’t want his draft quoted, but it says pretty much the same):

Though I’ve already written about Amazon.com’s supposed policy of no longer buying books from Lightning Source—and though nothing has changed—I keep getting asked about it by people who simply cannot believe that self publishing through Lightning is still viable. So, let me say this quite clearly:

Not a single independent self publisher is known to have been affected by Amazon’s new “policy” in any way. Only larger publishers and self publishing companies have been affected—and it doesn’t look as if Amazon ever intended it any other way. If you are self publishing through Lightning Source in the manner described in my book Aiming at Amazon, it is business as usual, for now and the foreseeable future.

Small comfort to the more medium-sized fish, of course. And none of this bears on Eszter’s shipping cost irritations, not directly (so I didn’t clutter her thread with it); but it’s relevant in that a source of the confusion (certainly there was some of that) is that Amazon is this funny Puzzle Palace of a Bazaar. Amazon isn’t just selling stuff to customers. It’s selling access to customers to other stores. Amazon Prime is this funny sort of deal because it’s sort of an attempt to lock the likes of Eszter into Amazon within Amazon. Well, anyway: Shepard is staring hard at one puzzle-piece, from the point of view of a seller. That’s an enlightening angle, if you are used to looking just as a customer. (Obviously it’s nothing new for bookstores to deal with publishers on one end and customers on the other. But the two sets of dealings now come together and mix in new ways).

In other Amazon news, the DVD for Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is actually a POD. (Or a MOD - manufacture-on-demand.) Whedon used Amazon’s CreateSpace service, which is Amazon’s attempt to eat Lulu.com’s lunch in a serious way. Interesting that such a big name would decide this is the way to go. In effect, it’s another lock-in. CreateSpace provides high quality (so everyone seems to say) and it’s cheap to use, so profit margins for creators can be higher than at, say, Lulu (which is seriously expensive. I use it to make family X-Mas albums, and I think I’m paying too much. I also use Blurb, which seems like a good service.) Your stuff gets listed on Amazon. But: it’s not going to be available anywhere else. So Dr. Horrible is only available from Amazon (I take it.) This is Shepard’s publishing philosophy as well: you can do well enough aiming only at Amazon. (Chapter 1 is: Forget Bookstores.) That’s a crucial tipping-point that scares lots of folks: when the inside of Amazon is big enough that whole businesses can live there. But it’s actually quite convenient for a crop of small businesses.

Discuss. I’d be curious to hear more about Amazon CreateSpace. Anyone have anything to say about it, good or bad?

UPDATE: just to clarify. Amazon’s CreateSpace doesn’t lock you in in any legal way. All POD services leave you owning your own stuff. (If any don’t, then run, don’t walk, in the opposite direction.) It’s just that being listed on Amazon is so attractive that Amazon can, in effect, offer nothing further, and still have an attractive service. If you want more you aren’t going to get much help from CreateSpace, but they aren’t stopping you from D.I.Y.