The warning applies to the vast majority of paperbacks manufactured via Print on Demand (POD). Starting today, Amazon began displaying the warning in two places on book detail pages. First, in small, black type at the top of the page:
Price:$17.05 & eligible for free shipping with Amazon Prime
In stock but may require an extra 1-2 days to process.
Until now, Amazon had offered one-day shipping on POD titles. The vast majority of those titles were printed by Lightning Source, a unit of Ingram. Usually the books were shipped from Lightning Source in an Amazon box, making it appear the book was shipped from Amazon’s warehouse.
With POD, paperbacks are printed only after a customer orders and pays for the book. Amazon still offers overnight shipping on a relatively few POD titles — those that sell so briskly that Amazon stocks copies in its warehouses. Here is
one example of a POD title that sells more than 200 copies per week on Amazon, yet is not stocked at the company’s warehouses and is subject to the delay.
UPDATE FROM AUTHOR: This afternoon, Amazon removed the two messages regarding delayed shipping from the affected POD titles. As an experiment, I signed into Amazon with a non-Prime account and purchased one copy of the title mentioned above, eBay 101, and paid $17.98 for overnight shipping. However, when I view the tracking for this order on Amazon’s Web site, the estimated delivery date is July 3, about three days from now. I hope Amazon will give me a break on the $17.98 if delivery actually takes three days.
Ironically, Amazon has been urging publishers to switch to its in-house POD services, BookSurge and CreateSpace. A
policy statement on Amazon’s Web site suggests that requiring publishers to use Amazon printing services would enable the company to prepare shipments within two hours. But the warning about shipping delays appears with most BookSurge and CreateSpace titles.
POD expert
Morris Rosenthal speculates that the warning about shipment delays might be Amazon’s response to complaints about long shipment times for POD books. Subscribers to the company’s Prime shipping deal are offered overnight shipping for only $3.99.
Publishers have increasingly turned to POD. According to Bowker Inc., POD titles exceeded the number of offset-printed titles for the first time this year.
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3 Comments
Thanks for helping make sense (?) of Amazon's policies – always a challenge. In addition to a book (published traditionally), I also self-published and sell a DVD and a CD/AudioBook. Amazon "stocks" both, but often places re-stocking orders of only ONE item at a time. I have to pay for shipping which would be less per item if only they would order more at a time. Sometimes I write and, yes, they have actually placed another order. Other times, I just wait until they place another single-item order and ship both together…
Another recent Amazon change – they've taken author blogs off of the product page. Maybe the opportunity to communicate with buyers was abused and became too cumbersome?
Just checked and my two books printed by CreateSpace don't have the message.
Amazon had already (for reasons known only to itself) made my other book (distributed by Lulu) no longer sold through Amazon. I fought with both Amazon and Lulu on this, but could get no decent answers. Fortunately, I'm getting steady sales as a 3rd party vendor. Their loss, I guess. Certainly, it's Lulu's loss.
Many others are not happy with the switch to Author pages, which took our blog posts off our product pages.
Another ploy by Amazon to utilize their services. It's a shame. But so far so good for this Lightning Source POD publisher. I've been using them for years to supply inventory to Amazon. The difference could be in the fact that I control where it ships from, either my warehouse or direct from Lightning Source.