Hey, I got my Very Own General Attorney General Letter!

Sheesh. Some people are idiots.

Some "wannabe" author who decided to go the self-publishing route via Xilbris had sent me a letter about one month ago accusing me of selling counterfit copies of his book on my website. Why? Well because the site listed that we had 100 copies in stock and of course, his current sales didn't correspond to that. I had not yet answered to the letter, as I considered this a low priority and was eventually going to get to it.

Now guess what, the idiotic author decided to file a complaint with the WA General Attorney. What really erks me with this is that the author obviously has no knowledge and understanding of the process involved with such do-it-yourself publishers and for print-on-demand books work. To me, the simple fact that the author would not educate himself properly and would rather hound and harass book sellers trying to sell his title makes me question the quality of the book in the first place.

Xilbris uses Print On Demand for the publishing of its titles. This means that there are no books that are pre-printed and are essentially printed as orders come in using a high-speed/quality/volume laser printing system. Xilbris, like most Prind On Demand (POD) publishers use Lightning Source Inc as the on demand printer. The main reason for choosing this provider is that it is owned by Ingram Books, one of the two major book distributors in the USA. Which means that since the distributor itself is printing the books, this means a quick turnaround when books are ordered.

One of the other pluses of Ingram, especially for a small online store like mine is that they offer drop-shipping services. This means that when an order is placed on my site, I simply route the order to Ingram who ships it directly to the customer. Although I do stock some titles, there is no way I can stock copies of every book out there (financially and space wise). The problem with POD books is that there isn't really a physical inventory of titles since they are printed as orders come in.

So this means that technically, the inventory level from the distributor would be zero. Lots of retailers don't differentiate between regular printed books and POD books so a stock level of zero would mean that the book would be considered as "backordered". But the reality is that with the current POD technology most orders can be processed and shipped in 24 hours. So to avoid this "backorder confusion" and promote the sale of POD titles, Ingram sets a token inventory level of 100 copies of all POD titles, which they feel corresponds to what they can realistically print and ship within a 1-2 day period.

Anyways, based on the sales figures the author showed to prove that I "must be counterfiting his book" there is no way it would make sense financially to create counterfit copy of self-published book with such small sales.