I found a couple posts on some rather big and important blogs which cover a topic I have seen echoing around online for about a week… In the effort to create something worth reading, I see articles which ‘push’ and conflate ideas and things into some tortures bits of wreckage. In this case it is the seemingly related news that Amazon.com is selling more eBooks than print books, along with the apparently troublesome notion that Amazon.com may in fact have a lot more vertical integration in the book market than…other publishers?
First off, the idea that Amazon.com is selling more eBooks is not the same thing as eBooks selling more than print books across the whole book marketplace (actually it’s quite far from it…). That Amazon.com has accomplished this is a testament to its marketing skills and the fact that is you are interested in buying a book online…eBooks make a lot more sense than if you were wandering around inside of a book store…nothing more.
The second idea that there may be (by implication) something sordid or unfair about vertically integrating your production, marketing, and sales organizations is something which virtually every business is trying to accomplish (or at least wish for…). In essence, this only means that Amazon.com has incrementally moved from merely being a book seller, to creating Ebook Readers, to being instrumental in transforming books to retail eBooks, and to virtually publish books on their own.
This is one of the more obvious emergent aspects of eBook retail…that publishing is not about galley proofs and printing plants anymore. The result is that it is only about creating a marketplace.
It may be inte3resting to compare this reaction from the publishing industry towards Amazon with the deeper vertical integration which Apple has long had in its market niches…
Amazon: The Book Industry “In a Box”?
http://gigaom.com/2011/05/20/amazon-the-book-industry-in-a-box
While most thought the biggest news out of Amazon’s e-book business this week was the revelation that e-books now eclipse print books, it was actually the launch of the company’s second genre imprint in the span of two weeks (and fifth imprint overall) that’s the bigger deal.
Why? Because by creating its own imprints, Amazon is essentially collapsing the entire industry into one company; everything that happens after a book is written — editing, marketing, storefront, the book itself — could conceivably be handled by Amazon.
In other words, for some authors, Amazon is book publishing “in a box.” Of course, this term is more often used (many times with disdain) in the technology industry to mean a turnkey solution, technology that, at least in the old world of off-the-shelf software, gave you everything you needed in a physical box at retail. But now, with what Amazon is offering authors through its imprints and all the services associated with Kindle, isn’t publishing a book essentially as turnkey as it gets?
But what about the authors themselves… should they worry about putting this much control in the hands of one company? Chances are that some will be just fine with it, as Joe Konrath’s many posts touting Amazon illustrate. For others, however, this is just another in an exploding number of options. Using Amazon as your publisher doesn’t mean you can’t self-publish other works across different e-book platforms (let’s not forget Nook, Kobo, Smashwords, iBookstore and so on), or you could choose to go old-school — like early e-book star Amanda Hocking — and sign a deal with one of the big five publishers.
It is, however, the big 5 publishers who should worry. While it hasn’t happened yet, eventually some of the old world’s biggest-name authors might sign a deal with Amazon to be their publisher. If they do, it would likely benefit the publishers to start considering some vertical consolidation themselves.
Is Amazon’s Kindle Destroying the Publishing Industry?
http://blogkindle.com/2011/05/is-amazons-kindle-destroying-the-publishing-industry
This isn’t a new topic, but it also doesn’t seem to be going away. There are some very loud people convinced that the Kindle spells the end of the book and they’re quite willing to say so. In a very, very limited way, they’re right. The problem is that they’re missing the point.
You see, books have come a long way already over the years. It doesn’t matter if you decide to cite oral tradition, serialized texts, or pretty much anything else as the origination point for the modern concept of the book, it’s not possible to deny that the book as we know it is an evolution from something else. The transition to the medium we know and love today, which is itself distinct from the books produced prior to the printing press for example, has allowed for more variety and enjoyment to emerge than ever before. The Kindle, and other eReaders like it, is simply the next stage in the ongoing progression. It takes the established situation and makes it more efficient to deliver, less restrictively. This isn’t a new topic, but it also doesn’t seem to be going away. There are some very loud people convinced that the Kindle spells the end of the book and they’re quite willing to say so. In a very, very limited way, they’re right. The problem is that they’re missing the point.
You see, books have come a long way already over the years. It doesn’t matter if you decide to cite oral tradition, serialized texts, or pretty much anything else as the origination point for the modern concept of the book, it’s not possible to deny that the book as we know it is an evolution from something else. The transition to the medium we know and love today, which is itself distinct from the books produced prior to the printing press for example, has allowed for more variety and enjoyment to emerge than ever before. The Kindle, and other eReaders like it, is simply the next stage in the ongoing progression. It takes the established situation and makes it more efficient to deliver, less restrictive in terms of publication, and more generally accessible overall.
In a way, this is the heart of the problem. The publishing industry isn’t built around the text. In the end, it doesn’t matter if they are selling the most amazing piece of literature ever written or the latest exploitation of the vampire romance novel phenomenon so long as people are buying. The industry makes its money by selling the book as a physical object and offering the person or people who produced the information inside a cut of the profit. If you take away the paper, their model seems less sustainable.
If anybody sitting at home can do the work to get a novel written, polished, and put up for sale with no need for a middle-man and at a higher percentage than the publishing houses are prone to offering, then what is the point of courting them? What we need to see now is some initiative on the part of these companies. What are they bringing to the table? It isn’t enough to cite history and what they’ve done before. If the Kindle is supposed to be single-handedly destroying publishing as we know it, you have to assume that it has more to do with what the public considers to be worth their money than it does with Jeff Bezos being an evil genius bent on taking over the world in terms of publication, and more generally accessible overall.
In a way, this is the heart of the problem. The publishing industry isn’t built around the text. In the end, it doesn’t matter if they are selling the most amazing piece of literature ever written or the latest exploitation of the vampire romance novel phenomenon so long as people are buying. The industry makes its money by selling the book as a physical object and offering the person or people who produced the information inside a cut of the profit. If you take away the paper, their model seems less sustainable.
If anybody sitting at home can do the work to get a novel written, polished, and put up for sale with no need for a middle-man and at a higher percentage than the publishing houses are prone to offering, then what is the point of courting them? What we need to see now is some initiative on the part of these companies. What are they bringing to the table? It isn’t enough to cite history and what they’ve done before. If the Kindle is supposed to be single-handedly destroying publishing as we know it, you have to assume that it has more to do with what the public considers to be worth their money than it does with Jeff Bezos being an evil genius bent on taking over the world.
