Probably resulting from the same suppression-projection syndrome that caused the Bush administration to first name the Iraqi invastion Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL).

The extremely long term of the contract and extensive rights grab is the big problem.

http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17

Get known, get big and perhaps you can alter the terms of the contract, if that debt was paid off quickly enough.

What you’re calling “Amazon’s service” *is* a publishing operation — and it’s got real pitfalls of its own.

As always, the writer’s only real defense is to do their research before entering into any agreements.

In normal, commercial publishing, publishers make their money by selling copies of their books to the general public. Whatever costs they incur come out of that gross income.When the author covers the costs, the publisher’s incentive vanishes.

You may be thinking that there’s still the incentive of making more money by selling more copies, but it doesn’t work that way. Finding good books, making them better, and making them known to the public, are difficult and expensive tasks, and there’s no guarantee that a given book will sell well enough to cover the additional costs.

On the other hand, the cost of turning a manuscript into a book is knowable — and the less value the publisher adds, the more knowable the cost of publication becomes. Vanity publishers who hit the right price points and maintain tight control over a stripped-down production process can make a small but certain profit off every book.

What you’re not going to see are mixed processes where hopeless books get perfunctory publication, and better ones get more attention. When a publisher runs a minimal-expense stripped-down process, every book gets tossed into the same meat grinder.

Hmm… imagine a world with sold out stadiums full of screaming fans, a lone author on stage, spotlight: “Chapter 1. It was a dark and stormy night…” Only $55 a ticket!

The print vanity presses have the advantage of the suckers who crave the validation of a nice printed book with their name on it, have no idea how much printing a book costs, can be stuck with optimistic minimum orders that moulder away in their attics as they futily attempt to sell them, etc.

Ebooks, though? The web is not exactly empty of people willing to programmatically convert your .doc to an epub and maybe slap an ISBN on it and check that the conversion process didn’t ruin the formatting too hard for a modest additional fee… 

Unless the service includes absolutely gilt-edged digital typesetting and editorial services, along with comprehensive pushing and promotion on the sales side, it’s just a glorified file format conversion.

I just don’t get it… Even from a purely practical perspective, unless it passes the ‘is this offer less evil than Amazon’s service?’ test, it’ll be a hard sell even to suckers.