Vossscher Verlag ■ Shop launch
The book has been on Amazon since World Book Day, 23 April. The publisher's own shop opens today, six days later. The gap was not laziness. It was the part of self-publishing that nobody warns one about, which is to say, the bit that happens after the manuscript is finished and the cover is approved and the book is supposedly done.
What follows is, more or less, the four small surprises that arrived between the two prices, and where they came from. The book is fine. The bureaucracy was the adventure.
Surprise One: The Amazon Arithmetic
Amazon is, by some considerable margin, the world's largest book distributor. The KDP royalty schedule returns 60 per cent of the list price to the publisher above their per-region pricing threshold, less printing costs, and 50 per cent below it, also less printing costs. By the time the printing of a 371-page hardcover and the territorial taxes have had their share, the publisher is left with roughly 40 to 50 per cent of the cover price.
This is mathematics rather than complaint, and one rather has to admit that the mathematics pays for the part where Amazon ships the book to a doorstep in São Paulo without the publisher being involved at all. It does, however, set the floor for what one's published price can be: a price below which the arithmetic on a print-on-demand title simply stops being arithmetic and starts being subsidy. The ceiling, as we shall see in surprise two, sits at exactly the same level.
Surprise Two: The German Price Binding
The second surprise is that the floor is not negotiable, and that it is also the ceiling.
Once an ISBN is registered to a German publisher, the Buchpreisbindungsgesetz (the German Book Price Binding Act, BuchPrG) applies. Section 5 obliges the publisher to set a single end price including value-added tax. Section 3 obliges every commercial seller to charge that price, including the publishing house itself in its own direct sales. One cannot, had one wanted to, undercut Amazon on one's own shop. The hardcover is 90 EUR and the paperback 80 EUR everywhere this book is legally sold, because the law says so and rather firmly.
This is, as it happens, one of the better laws of its kind. It survives independent bookshops in town centres, ensures cross-subsidy between bestsellers and difficult literature, and prevents the predictable race to the bottom that an unregulated print market produces in a country where two warehouses can dominate fulfilment. The publisher pays for this protection by giving up the lever of "buy direct, save a tenner" entirely. The buyer gets, in exchange, a country with actual bookshops in it. A trade one can defend.
Surprise Three: The Quarterly Tax Window
The third surprise is that the German state takes its time.
For digital editions sold across the European Union, German publishers register through the One-Stop-Shop (OSS) scheme at the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern. The scheme is, in principle, the elegant solution to a previously unwieldy problem: rather than registering for VAT in each of twenty-six other member states individually, one collects the right rate per buyer and remits the lot through a single quarterly return at home. Splendid.
The catch is the activation date. OSS registration becomes effective on the first day of the calendar quarter following the application, regardless of when within that quarter one applied. Filed in mid-April, effective 1 July. Until then, the digital editions reach Germany and any country outside the EU, but not, somewhat awkwardly, the rest of the Union. The brilliance of the simplification is undone, for new entrants, by a delay one rather has to plan around.
This is where the calendar of a small publisher and the calendar of a tax authority disagree. The publisher schedules a launch around World Book Day. The tax authority schedules it around the next quarter. Both are reasonable, in their respective contexts, and one is, as a small publisher, obliged to defer to the latter.
Surprise Four: The Bundle That Was Not To Be
The fourth surprise was that one cannot, even at the same total price, give a digital edition away with a print copy.
The original plan had been to bundle the PDF for free with every print order, on the perfectly reasonable theory that a reader who has paid 90 EUR for a hardcover ought to have the search-and-copy version too. The BuchPrG §7 allows only goods of small value as ancillary benefits to a book sale, and a 40 EUR digital edition with its own ISBN does not, by any reading, count as small. The digital edition gets its own ISBN precisely so that one can sell it as a separate work; the same separation that confers standing in the catalogue forbids one to give it away as a wrapper.
In practice this is a reasonable rule. It prevents a well-capitalised house from killing its competitors by simply stapling everything to a hardcover and calling it a deal. For a small publisher with one title it is, however, a slightly amusing constraint to discover at the last moment.
The Plumbing: Stripe
Beneath the prices and the law sits the boring layer that makes any of this possible at all. The reality of a modern payment processor is closer to a rather elaborate plumbing diagram than to a uniform global market. Stripe currently lists around fifty countries as supported merchant locations: territories where one's company can hold a Stripe account, settle in local currency, and bill on local rails. From those merchant locations, customers worldwide can in principle pay, but the local payment methods (SEPA, iDEAL, Bancontact, BLIK, Klarna, OXXO, FPX, and so forth) need to be enabled and tested per market.
Today is the European-and-American rollout: euro-area cards and SEPA, sterling cards, the major North American rails. The rest of the supported merchant geography follows in the coming weeks, country by country, as soon as one has tested that a payment from an unfamiliar rail actually arrives in the right ledger with the right tax flag. The world is not uniform; the plumbing has to be laid by hand.
The Numbers
For the avoidance of doubt:
- Hardcover: 90 EUR — identical on Amazon and at vossscher-verlag.com (BuchPrG). Direct buyers receive a hand-signed copy.
- Paperback: 80 EUR — identical on Amazon and direct (BuchPrG). Direct buyers receive a hand-signed copy.
- PDF: 40 EUR — direct only.
- ePub: 40 EUR — direct only.
Print prices are identical everywhere by law; digital editions are direct-only and ship to Germany or non-EU countries until the OSS registration takes effect on 1 July, after which they ship across the full European Union.
A Community Book by Design
The book is, deliberately, a community book. Corrections and ideas go through an open issue form on GitHub; credit by name on request. The second printing will fold them in. Anyone who has ever written a manual knows that a sufficiently attentive reader sees things the author cannot, and one rather looks forward to that.
A quiet old admin and developer who normally researches in his own corner ended up writing a book and daily posts because, at Christmas 2025, his doctor ordered an extended pause from work, a sofa turned into a writing desk, and the voices on LinkedIn agreed it was overdue. Both of those, together, are what is on sale today.
And now: laptop closed, dog called, Vosges du Nord. Sun, hills, brooks, woodland. Rather the prescription.
23 April 2026: book on Amazon. 29 April 2026: publisher's direct shop opens at vossscher-verlag.com. Hardcover 90 EUR, paperback 80 EUR, both hand-signed direct. PDF and ePub 40 EUR each, direct-only. Print prices fixed by BuchPrG. Digital ships to DE and non-EU until 1 July when OSS registration takes effect across the EU. Stripe Europe + North America today, rest of the supported merchant world by hand in the coming weeks.