Notice of Demand
To: a1books.com, 11 Stewart Place, Fairfield, NJ 07004 USADate: 22nd March 2002
On behalf of Alan Clay, author and copyright owner of 'Believers in
Love' (ISBN 0957884400) and 'Dance Sisters'(ISBN 0646302671)
and of Artmedia Publishing, sole authorized publisher of these
books, it is hereby demanded that, within seven days of the date of
this notice, a1books.com:
Either: Permanently stop selling 'Believers in Love' and 'Dance
Sisters', whether published by ATIA ( ), or by any other publisher,
and remove all references to the books from the a1books.com site
and amazon zshops.
Or: Provide written documentation of the legitimate source of these
books to the copyright owner - explaining why the first copy of each
of these books that you sell, is a 'used' copy, and how you can sell
'Dance Sisters' at a profit at US$11.75 - and immediately correct
the publisher information for these books on your site to read
Artmedia Publishing.
Failing one of these actions, we give notice that:
1 We will seek wide publicity for this dispute, to encourage a
transparent process.
2 We reserve our right to pursue court action to force you to
surrender all existing copies of 'Believers in Love' and 'Dance
Sisters' in your possession and any files which could be used to
create the books, plus provide a full accounting of copies sold
and pay all moneys received through the sale of the books to the
copyright owner.
3 Should it prove to be the case that you, or any related entity, are
pirating the 'Print on Demand' files to these books, we also reserve
our right to seek punitive damages calculated on a daily basis from
the date of this notice.
Alan Clay, Artmedia Publishing
epublish@artmedia.com.au www.artmedia.com.au
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To which we received the following reply (27 March 2002):
Dear Mr. Clay: We are removing ISBNs 0957884400 and
0646302671 from our site.
We receive them from Ingram Book Co. at a 35% discount. We
do not buy stock to keep on hand. Ingram ships directly to our
customers. We list as a used dealer on Amazon Marketplace
because 1) there was not a "new" option when we began selling
books there, and 2) some books (not these particular titles) we sell
there are used or remainders, so we've never listed in the "new"
category. We notice that many dealers listing as new are actually
remainder dealers, so it seems to be a meaningless distinction.
Until this moment, that is.
As for the pricing, we do not normally sell at such short markup and
the price you quote for Dance Sisters seems to be a mistake. We
have a bug which occasionally drops the price under the margin
floor and we are working to correct this. I checked Amazon upon
opening your letter and saw that while we still had Believers in Love
listed at a reasonable margin (it is being removed as I write this),
Dance Sisters was no longer listed, so the system must have been
corrected since that day.
Another bug we are fixing is the insertion of our internal publisher
identification code in the publisher field on our site.
I hope this has gone some way toward resolving our problems. I
apologize for any trouble our listings have caused you and hope
that we can work together to sell your books in the future. Please
feel free to contact me directly in the future should you have any
other questions or concerns.
Best regards, Ben Archer, Director of Sales & Marketing
www.a1Books.com email: ben@a1books.com
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The titles were duly removed, but were back up again last month,
still with the incorrect publisher information. Not a very permanent
removal!
This site published by Artmedia Publishing e-mail: epublish@artmedia.com.au The content of this site is copyright, and no part may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Last updated 3rd September 2002
