Haremnights said "I had a problem with Origin too, and there is a problem with what they did. They were offering books for sale that aren't even available in print format. And they were offering them at 200+ dollars." What has happened to me and others (scour the forum archives) is that a cheap or downloadable electronic edition of the book that is in PDF is either print ready or can easily be made to be print ready.
I have seen very very few people on here saying their book has actually been 'stolen', perhaps 2 people in years, ans when asked for further details they do not return ...
But indeed that is a problem with things like PDFs, but one has to ask why would any one bother to reproduce our books? We are not famous writers (yet). Copy and mail the PDF perhaps to many 100s, but some writers actually welcome that and why they allowed a PDF in the first place!
Having an efile in the PDF format is enabling piracy, IMHO, and I have been pirated this way. Maybe the Kindle format offers some protection by being propreitary and non-print ready BUT I'm sure some hacker has written code to compile Kindle files into print-ready PDFs. It's a matter of time, anyway. You see I'm paranoid about efiles.
Seems you are paranoid yes. I suppose DRM helps to some degree, but there are a few versions of that to complicate matters and one should be standadised biu I am not sure epubs or whatever will go the same way as MP3s because the interest in books is no where near as big as it is in music.
So it sounds like Origin has put a price on its own trouble of buying Haremnight's efile, getting it print ready, and then running a copy. I suspect they have no stock - your order triggers a chain of events. Their price reflects a one-off hassle.
They do not need to be so complex. Do you know how much a BOD machine costs? I suspect all they were doing were buying books from Amazon or Lulu, there is no law against that.
Aaron Shepard in Aiming at Amazon has also noticed this reseller phenomenon and has a very interesting explanation of what is happening (and he's cool with it, by the way).
Without getting into the particulars of his preferred POD vendor, let's generalize and say that these Amazon and ebay sellers are swimming upstream to the wholesale source and buying there then reselling on Amazon. They can undercut your list price this way but as Aaron and Peter say, you're still going to get paid the same royalty in the end.
We do not really have a list price as such. This is BOD. We have a single item production cost and no stock, is that makes sense? But that we still get our profit is not the issue, it's the principle. But I actually think Origin's 'Spider' tool, which is simular to auto-bidding 'tools' used on E-bay, has got carried away. Who in their right mind would try to sell a £10 book by unknown writers for £150?! It makes no sense, it feels like a software glitch to me. Unless it's a trick to entice people to buy them for £10 and try to sell them to Origin for £90? 
How can this be, you ask? Well, if you have a title enrolled in the extendedreach program, your title is listed in the Ingram (wholesale) catalog where I can look it up and order it. I can open a bookstore account with Ingram and I will pay the wholesale price. I don't have to buy in bulk either.
Yes? So?
This is another reason why you see a reseller selling "new" editions of a title.
Okay, so booksellers are going to have wholesale accounts and they are going to sell new stuff on Amazon. But why the sky-high prices?
They are either testing the market or running a tax dodge. The tax dodge is one used by a lot of retail stores and is quite infamous. Say I am an Amazon seller with two different accounts, Origin and Demise. Demise posts a price that undercuts the full Amazon "new" price. Some bargain hunter orders your book from Demise via Amazon. Demise now has to fulfill the order. It has Origin buy your book wholesale through the distributor. Demise then "pays" Origin $110 dollars for your book which it ships to the bargain hunter. The $110 (or whatever) is an accounting game played between Origin and Demise; it's a public price of record; it has documentary proof for audit purposes. Using this dodge Origin/Demise can shelter lots of earnings, making them look like losses.
This is what I think is happening, if it makes sense.
That makes little sense. Only an idiot IR inspector would fall for that.
