Oh Amazon.

Remember back in the old first heady days of Amazon when people like me, surrounded by farmland and little children, could discover and order a book, almost any book, and have it hand-delivered to their own personal boondocks? While savings didn’t really exist in price, the service totally made up for it in terms of hassle and availability.

When I wrote my first book and published it just last year, Amazon was also there as a storefront and potential for marketing. Just a bit ago, I even uploaded my book to Kindle for no charge.

However, there are low rumblings and sweet Amazon words coming through my email every week encouraging me to use their POD service when my shelf stock runs out. I’ve been a loyal Lulu user for a couple of years now—printing everything from our local small press offerings to class materials to books. The printed books are always perfectly bound, the pages straight, the text crisp, the covers brilliant.

But, they’re also pretty expensive, particularly as it’s difficult to have orders from Baker & Taylor or Amazon shipped directly from the store.

So here comes Amazon and an enticing CreateSpace offer last week. No set-up charge (unlike BookSurge’s $299 a pop), and single copies running about $5.70 each. Lulu costs me about nine bucks, and that’s not including shipping. So, we’re talking about half the price—big savings. Huge savings.

Let’s try it.

I did. I uploaded the same PDF files I use at Lulu. The very same ones; I didn’t change a thing. It was easy, although CreateSpace didn’t allow me to look at proof online. I had to order one. Which I did. It arrived very quickly—within a week of the upload.

Big disappointment. The title on the cover looks like it’s been chewed at the edges, ditto the spine text. The barcode on the back is blurry and the blurb almost illegible. Although the interior text is legible, it’s far from crisp, and a comparison with the Lulu copy makes it look bloated. Just all around poor printing quality plain and simple.

While I’m sure I could get away with interior text in bookstores, I’m also sure that no one but my mom is going to want to display or endorse a book with such a carelessly produced cover.

Of course, I corresponded with Amazon about the problem, but they weren’t interested.

    Please Note: This e-mail message was sent from a notification-only address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

    Hello Heather,

    Thank you for your reply.

    We are sorry to hear that you are unhappy with our services. We wish you luck in your future endeavors.

    Please feel free to contact us with any other inquiries.


So what I want to know is what happens to authors like me when our shelf stock runs out? Will we be faced with a choice of sinking or swimming in Amazon’s river? And who’s name will be Mud?

I didn’t cook as a kid living at home, and I didn’t cook when I went to college. I think I may have started to think about cooking when I tried to make an omelette from romantic description in Alejo Carpentier’s City of Light. Awful. Oh, and the nostalgic tuna noodle casserole (forgive me, I was pregnant). Revolting.

Coming of age in Mexico and handicapped by my feeble reading skills, the books in my house were all there because I’d heaved them down from Michigan. Initially, I had one cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. The old blue hardback edition with the very fiftyish line drawings, probably snitched from my mom’s kitchen. I recall that the page with the spaghetti recipe was stained with tomato sauce—not my tomato sauce. (I don’t remember my mom ever making spaghetti, so maybe the book wasn’t hers after all.)

Anyway, I read it cover to cover. Can you believe it? It’s quite chatty and there are little tips and asides on nearly every page. I also learned about canning, pickling, natural pectins, and yeasts at high altitudes. It wasn’t McGee, but it was thorough for its time. I did learn to make a great Devil’s Food cake by reading and experimenting.

I don’t remember actually buying Molly Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook, but the objectness of it, the color of its cover, the illustrations and handwritten text, are forever integral to falling in love with cooking. I’m sure I cooked every single dish she recorded, and some of them became standard fare—Tuesdays for samozas and Thursdays for lentil burgers. The book had multiple uses also as the best recipes became translation exercises, and I even created a flipbook for my daughter on the right-hand pages.

And there were the salads. Who knew? Back in my growing-up house, we had two kinds of everyday salad: cottage cheese and canned peaches on iceberg and iceberg with Wishbone Italian. (On special occasions, we had frozen marshmallow salad.) Molly Katzen’s simple Garlic & Herb Vinaigrette was a revelation. And remember White Rabbit? Or Alfa-Romaino?

If your Moosewood Cookbook looks anything like mine (how can I toss it with the flipbook, the notes), you’ll appreciate Ten Speed reissuing in a compact form Mollie Katzen’s Recipes: Salads (978-1-58008-878-7). You never know: give it as a gift and twenty years from now that person might say, This is the book that started it all.