Well, here is the latest twist in the continuing tale of shipping times and availability of my camera books on Amazon.com. I won’t go back over much of the history, which I have discussed over the past few weeks.  Basically, the three most current books — the ones on the Panasonic Lumix LX5, Leica D-Lux 5, and Canon PowerShot S95, have been listed on Amazon as shipping within 2-3 weeks, instead of within 24 hours.  This afternoon, though, the Leica D-Lux 5 book started showing up again as In Stock, and shipping overnight if you order within a certain number of minutes.  This should mean that Amazon has some actual copies of the book in its warehouse, ready to ship. The other 2 most current books are still shown as shipping in 2-3 weeks.

One of the theories floating around says that Amazon drops print-on-demand books like these to the 2-3 week shipping status when they start selling better, and brings them back to In Stock status when their sales fall off.  This evidently would be because of the economics of warehouse storage, drop shipping, and things of that nature.

Anyway, the sales of the D-Lux 5 book had been dropping off; now, with the book being back in stock for immediate shipping at Amazon, maybe sales will pick up a bit, and then we’ll see if the shipping status reverts back to 2-3 weeks.  For now, though, the book is readily available.

Of course, you also have the option of purchasing any of these books from bn.com or from third-party sellers on Amazon, as well as from other sellers, such as camerabooks.com, powells.com, and others.