In the larger picture of things, Amazon's role in print-on-demand will be relatively small now that it has adopted the strategy of demanding independent authors and publishers use its exclusive services. Print-on-demand is much bigger than Amazon, and perhaps the company would do a better job as a warehouse of objects other than books and literature. They are about jungle enough for Amazon to handle. Perhaps they could ask that everything that the world produces be manufactured in one of its plants.
I once worked in a bakery in Montreal. At the time, it was owned by the Weston's company and was reputed to be the largest factory under one roof. That's what I did for several summers before EXPO 67. I painted the interior of the Weston Bakery roof. I worked with a native of a local tribe. He was not afraid of going high except after those nights that he loved his wife. "Today, I can't go up," he would say adding, "I loved my wife."
Westons produced bread for most of Montreal and the Eastern provinces. The number of lines of bread with different brand names was to me, a lowly summer employee, quite staggering. In the end, we would have to strip off the paper as it returned to the factory having gone stale. The returned bread was sold to the local pig farms and the bread ended up as Canadian bacon. Perhaps, the Amazon strategy will unfold in a similar way ending up as pig feed.
If one looks at the trend in new authors and new books, one is staggered by the dimensions. Literature is taking off. We are at the early stages of another cultural revolution. They said the printing press started civilization. Well, it is my feeling that print-on-demand, the internet publishers, and the rise of pluralism in authorship have begun a staggering revolution in the way we partipate in our democracies.
No entity focused on money is going to be able to monopolize this process. If the profit is there, the numbers of new entrants into the industry will be staggering as well. The writing is on the wall for a wave of new publishing companies who have authors to do the vertical integration and marketing of books themselves. My publishing effort, Togwells, with its focus on development of values will participate in this revolution in a very very minor way because the scale of the change is much much too large. It is important that publishers focus on values and work with marketing efforts that focus on values.
