Originally incorporated in 1996 as Lightning Print Inc., the company is headquartered in La Vergne, Tennessee, United States.
IngramSpark is a service operated by Lightning Source to cater for the needs of independent publishers and authors.
It also allows large bookshops to offer their customers almost immediate access to a wider range of titles than could be held onsite.
Lightning Source has an e-book supply system that can serve up protected PDF copies of books from their library through a vendor's site if a publisher chooses to participate.
[4] However, in April 2012 the U.S. Department of Justice sued Apple, Macmillan, and others on the basis that the agency model was anti-competitive and a form of collusion used to fix the price of e-books.