TuneCore, Amazon Team Up To Make It Even Easier & Cheaper For Bands To Sell CDs

from the label?-what-for? dept

Continuing the theme of this week about the new ecosystem of companies out there making it ever and ever easier for musicians to do everything a label used to do for them, comes the news (submitted by zealeus) that Amazon and TuneCore have teamed up to make it incredibly easy and cheap to sell CDs on demand. TuneCore is a very popular service with indie bands, helping them get their content onto various music services -- and now they're adding the ability to do incredibly cheap CDs-on-demand via Amazon. The whole thing costs a grand total of $31/year. Wired does some math, and recognizes that at a price point of $8.98 for the CD, a band only needs to sell nine CDs a year to break even. Nine. While some may say the CD market is dying, if you can offer it at almost no cost to the band, why not have it as an option?

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Judge Recognizes The Obvious: Printer Shouldn't Be Liable For A Book It Prints

from the putting-liability-where-it-belongs dept

Just last week we wrote about the Republican National Committee suing CafePress for selling t-shirt designs from users that include RNC trademarks (the "GOP" phrase and the RNC's elephant). Even though the RNC has backed down, CafePress may be happy to hear that a ruling in a different case seems to support the idea that CafePress shouldn't be liable. Eric Goldman points us to quite a series of lawsuits up in Maine between two families. Apparently, the daughters of the families were once friends in high school but had something of... er... a falling out. Take your average "former best friends" dispute and multiply it by about 100. This one involved both girls getting expelled and one eventually being convicted of a hate crime against the other.

The family of the convicted girl believe they've been wronged, and began a publicity campaign in their own favor. Part of this campaign involved a self-published book telling their side of the story. They tried to find a publisher for it, but publishers (wisely, from the sound of it) wanted no part of it. So, instead, they used a print-on-demand publisher. The other family, of course, sued everyone involved for defamation, including the print-on-demand company, BookSurge.

Without even using section 230 of the CDA, BookSurge has been let off the hook in the case, as the judge noted that it made no sense to include them in the case:

Because BookSurge does not undertake to edit, review or fact-check any of its publications, it has no means or way of knowing whether defamatory material is contained within the works that it publishes. BookSurge maintained no editorial control over the works published. The responsibilities of BookSurge, which are known to the authors of the works, indicate that it is not an active participant in the creation of any defamation.

This fits with what we've always said about section 230 of the CDA. Even if it didn't exist, it makes legal sense simply not to allow lawsuits against a mere middleman for the actions of an end user. It's nice to see the court recognize that here.

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Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Amazon For Blocking Out Other Print On Demand Providers

from the had-to-see-that-coming dept

Back in March, we wrote about Amazon's surprise decision to only sell print-on-demand books that were serviced through Amazon's own print-on-demand system. This upset an awful lot of book authors who used alternatives and felt that Amazon was blocking them out and forcing them to use a solution they didn't like very much. Amazon tried to quell the anger by explaining the reasoning and saying that authors could still use other POD solutions if they supplied Amazon with an inventory of five books (which sort of defeats the purpose of POD). So, it should come as little surprise that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Amazon, claiming that it's violating anti-trust laws in blocking out other POD suppliers. It may be difficult to prove an actual anti-trust violation -- but no matter what the result, it's rather surprising that Amazon would do this, as the company had to know it would piss off a lot of authors who have been huge supporters of the site for many years. It's hard to see how the trouble of having to fulfill from other POD providers could really be worth that much anger and ill-will.

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Taking The Books-On-Demand Business Quite Literally

from the now-that's-one-long-tail dept

It would appear that Philip Parker has taken the concept of "the long tail" to heart. He's created a publishing company that has a bunch of computers search the internet and come up with books on various topics in a nearly totally automated fashion. The details aren't at all clear from the article (and I'm surprised there's no discussion at all of potential copyright issues), but it almost sounds like a sort of madlibs -- where someone just need to fill in some blanks, and the computer automates the rest of the book writing process. As a result, Parker reportedly has over 200,000 books published and available on Amazon to date (though, oddly, my own search turned up many fewer), which are all available for "print-on-demand." From the sound of things, you get the feeling that he could take it back one step further to: generate on demand. In the article he provides an example, creating a new "book" in about 13 minutes. That way, a single sale of each book is pure profit. Of course, you might be wise to question the quality of such books. The reviews I found on Amazon of his books are almost universally quite negative.

In the meantime, if anyone has more info on Parker or Icon Group, and how it deals with copyright issues, I'd be curious to know more. Parker has a video on YouTube which (by title) suggests he has a patent on this whole process (a quick search turns up this patent on a method and apparatus for automated authoring and marketing as the likely patent). The video makes a bunch of claims, but does little to explain how any of this is actually done. Actually, you could say the same thing for the patent itself. It makes a bunch of extremely broad claims, that don't actually do anything to explain how it actually works (which, we had thought, was part of the requirement in getting a patent).

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Amazon Says It Will Only Sell Print-On-Demand Books That It Gets To Print

from the well,-that's-not-very-neighborly dept

Amazon has generally been a rather friendly neighbor in the e-commerce world, not acting vindictively against competitors, but focusing on improving its customer experience continuously, and figuring that's a better way to beat the competition. Apparently, that's not working in the print-on-demand space, however. You may recall that in 2005 Amazon bought a print-on-demand company. There are a few other print-on-demand companies out there, some of which have pretty good reputations and are probably more widely known than Amazon's print-on-demand offering. It would appear that Amazon has a problem with that. It's now saying that it won't sell books from competing print-on-demand shops, requiring anyone who wants to do print-on-demand to use Amazon's (more expensive) service. This is a pretty aggressive (and totally unnecessary) move. You would think that Amazon might play nicer. Any bets on how long it takes for another print-on-demand firm to sue over this decision?

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