AuthorHouse Bows to Amazon Pressure Over Booksurge
By Claire Kirch -- Publishers Weekly, 4/21/2008 7:53:00 AM
According to sources familiar with Author Solutions, the Indiana-based parent company of subsidy publishers AuthorHouse and iUniverse, the company has acceded to Amazon.com’s recent demand that publishers’s print-on-demand titles be printed by BookSurge, Amazon.com’s POD subsidiary, if they wish to continue to make these titles available for sale on Amazon.com.When contacted by PW, Kevin Gray, Author Solutions public relations manager, refused to confirm or deny the rumors swirling about the industry, referring PW instead to a written statement posted on the company’s Web site by Kevin Weiss, Author Solutions CEO.
“Everything is in the statement,” Gray insisted. “I have to stick with the statement.”
In the ambiguously-worded statement on the “current Amazon/Booksurge situation,” addressed to Author Solutions’s current and potential customers, Weiss, who replaced former CEO Bryan Smith in December, claims he’s “clearly stating our position,” but asserts only that Author Solutions does not believe that it is “ever in your interest to limit choice,” and that the company does not “anticipate any change to the current availability of our titles on Amazon, either in the short or the long term.” Weiss also promises to “fight anything that is done to limit choice, increase cost, or weaken the industry that together we’ve worked so hard to build.”
One AuthorHouse customer, who asked that she not be identified, told PW that she has not been informed one way or another about Author Solutions’s response to Amazon.com’s demand that all POD titles sold on its Web site be printed by BookSurge.
