Printing is hard.
Used to be I couldn’t be bothered with print-on-demand for most of my indie-published stuff. It was way too difficult to manage the content management systems, and there’s no economies of scale with a print run of one, so it was also super spendy.
But the CMS, especially at Amazon, got better, and as trade published books got more expensive (thirty-five bucks for a trade paperback, are you fucking kidding me!?) the numbers started to line up.
Plus, there are just some people who prefer paper and are willing to pay for it. So I revisited the process a while ago and started experimenting.
As always, the friction is mostly outside the Amazon ecosystem. For all of the billionaire tyrant behaviour, Bezos does know how to build a platform. The two paperbacks below are the Amazon print copy on the left and the IngramSpark on the right
If you dial right in, you’ll see Jeff’s copy is supersharp hi-res, and the alternative, i.e., the rest of the market, is some fuzzy fucking shit. (FWIW, the nice, sharp Amazon edition only cost me a couple of dollarydoos to run up a test copy and have it shipped out. That shitty alternative print job cost nearly thirty bucks, just so I could see how bad it was.)
It can be fixed, and I will get onto that today, but man, why does it have to be so fucking hard to escape the monopoly?
Printing is hard because printers are involved and in ancient aramaic, printers means Spawn of Hell, Bringers of The End Times, Makers of Frustration, Drivers to Drink and Fucking Bastard Things.
Aramaic is very versatile language, apparently.
I was going to say something about the price of books being insanely high, but I've noticed everything is priced insanely high these days.
For shits and giggles a few weeks ago I went to look at the price of what I used to order at Hungry Jacks (I think someone was complaining about the price of the local burger joint), and for the burger alone is was nearly $19.
I wouldn't mind Amazon so much if Bezos were doing something noble with the billions they make. End world poverty, free education for the world, a UBI. Anything other than racing towards becoming the worlds first trillionaire (spellcheck might need to get used to that word soon).