Best regards.

I wish Yuri Prazelski all the best success with Adegi, but until Andrei Volgin addresses the book fulfillment problem to the satisfaction of all of his customers, I would recommend people stay away from Elibron. An offense to one is an offense to all. By saying, “As long as I’m okay, I don’t care how others fare,” we are only encouraging continued exploitation.

I ordered books yesterday and the website claims it’s been shipped yesterday. A remarkable feat considering a wait of six months on my previous order.

If there’s not another post from this customer, all is well.

Volgin’s part is only to keep Elibron’s servers running and selling e-books for download, which as you have seen may be reliable and unreliable as the case may be. This has no bearing on the quality of work done by the printing company, which, it appears from Steve Stellman’s message above from December, is doing a much better job than Volgin could do on his own. I was frankly worried that Adegi was controlled by Elibron, and I am convinced it is totally independent.

As a longtime expert in this field, I’d send my own books to Adegi.com based on what I know about them, and I will be referring people to them.

After all, it appears evident from this page alone that hundreds or even thousands of people may have had money stolen from them by Elibron. Under those circumstances, I would think that it would be a very interesting story — I mean the story of who you are and how it is possible that you can be so wonderfully comfortable working with Andrei Volgin. Please enlighten us.

I’ll tell you a related story to get us started: When VolumeOne stopped taking print orders, we had about 20 or 30 that we could not fill. I personally spent several weeks going through that list, bending over backwards, and ensuring that every last one of them either had their order filled or had the charge credited. It was a lot of work. Why hasn’t Elibron done that? Why would you (or anyone else) feel comfortable working with an individual that has caused so many people to suffer that they would complain like this online?

We had endless discussions over the phone and through e-mail, and after a time it became rather obvious that he was drawing heavily on my expertise and the connections I was making for him, without intending to finalize any sort of agreement.

We were two companies among a half-dozen or so (including 3BillionBooks, Sprout, ODMC, InstaBook, and LightningPrint) who were seriously working on the on-demand book problem from 1997 to about 2002. I introduced Andrei to all of these people. ODMC and Jeff Marsh ended up refining Jeff’s machine and it is now called the Espresso BookMachine, after successfully settling with LightningSource on infringement of the late Harvey Ross’ patent 5,465,213 (eek, it’s all still there in my head, though I can’t remember what I had for breakfast). The rest of the companies are moribund or dead.

Volgin was a shady and indiscriminate operator who had made a significant amount of money operating factories in Russia. One does not want to know the details of that. His arrangement with the Moscow State Library, he told me, was to rehab their front entryway in exchange for five years’ exclusive access to digitally scan their books. He claimed to be doing 1,000 books per day and therefore would have a million books online before anyone else (this was an astonishing claim in those days, and a kind of a race). His operation was well-funded, in an odd and shady way, but as you can see he has no qualms about mistreating others. I would steer clear of anything he does.

If you are owed money by him, I recommend contacting your credit card companies and demanding a refund.

Any thoughts or comments welcome.
Ian