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Thursday, January 26, 2012

Books How Amazon Beat Publishing at Its Own Game

Posted by Paul Constant on Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 4:27 PM

This Businessweek story does a very good job of explaining what's been happening behind the scenes in the relationship between Amazon.com and the publishing industry:

For years the marriage between Amazon.com and the big New York-based publishers was mostly a happy one. Amazon was expanding the overall market for books and giving publishers a new way to connect with readers...Back then, Bezos was cultivating friendly relations with publishers and trying to make his e-commerce company profitable. In 1999, when Businessweek asked him whether he would ever move from the business of selling books into the business of making them, Bezos demurred: “We’re really, really good at exactly one thing, which is helping customers discover things that they might want to buy online. And that’s enough.”

The rifts opened eight years later, during Amazon’s development of the Kindle e-reader. Representatives of Amazon streamed through the offices of New York publishers, urging them to accelerate the pace of digitizing their catalogs ahead of the device’s big launch. The book houses cooperated and even obediently kept the successive Kindle prototypes that Amazon showed them a secret from the outside world. Then Bezos got on stage at the W New York hotel in Union Square in November 2007, and as part of the unveiling of the Kindle, proclaimed that he would sell New York Times bestsellers for $9.99.

Publishers were shocked...

You really should read the whole thing.

Comments (2) RSS

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This is a great article. However I'm pretty sure you and I are reading it very differently.

Talk like that hasn’t mollified publishers, and it’s easy to see why. They’re trying to protect a century-old business model—and their role as nurturers of literary culture—from encroachment by a company that consistently reimagines how industries can be run more efficiently. Book publishing, an inefficient industry if there ever was one, seems ripe for reimagining.

And I love this!

Kirshbaum was also an early backer of electronic books. In 1995 he formed a group called Time Warner Electronic Publishing and started putting books on floppy disks.

Posted by sisyphusgal on January 26, 2012 at 5:23 PM

How could publishers possibly be surprised that Amazon wanted to sell electronic versions of bestsellers at low prices? That was their exact strategy for hardcovers and paperbacks.

And guess what? For most books that I've bought, the print price is still only a few dollars more than the electronic version. Just like music and newspapers, we're all growing used to the idea that the physical package is only a very small part of the value included int purchase price. It's been this way for a very long time, but the widespread availability of digital versions is just making this more evident.

Posted by Josh Bis