The Authors Guild Fights Amazon

The Authors Guild is the nation's professional organization for writers, aiding and protecting author's interest in copyright, fair contracts, and free expression since 1912.

Amazon’s Taking Another Bite of the Publishing Pie

“One might wonder how there can be ‘new’ copies offered by someone other than the publisher and how they can be sold for $.01 plus shipping (the high shipping costs are apparently where these sellers make their profit).

“The Authors Guild has spoken to several major publishers in the past year about where all these second-hand ‘new’ copies come from, and no one seems to really know. Some surmise that they are review copies, but there are far too many cut-rate ‘new’ copies for them all to be review copies.

“Could they be returns from bookstores that never made it back to the publisher? Did they fall off the back of a truck? We don’t know. What we do know is that the re-sellers must be acquiring them at cut-rate price and that there appear to be enough of these copies available that they could replace sales for the truly new copies—those that bring money to the publisher and royalties to the author.”