I realise that some of my more recent posts may lead readers of this blog to think I have something against Amazon. I don’t ... not really ... well nothing more than I have against any major faceless corporation. To be fair to Amazon it has had quite a profound influence on the massive changes we are seeing in the book industry today. Whether you take these influences as good or bad I suppose depends on your perspective on the whole thing but , to state the obvious, the substantial growth in eBook sales is in no small part down to Amazon.
eBooks have been around quite a long time – Project Gutenburg is a good milestone and that started up in 1971. So we’re talking a good long time before Amazon was even a gleam in Jeff Bezos eye.
Even with the popular adoption of the internet (lets say in the 90’s) people weren’t suddenly reading novels on their PC’s – some tried (like me) but it just didn’t work. The experience just wasn’t right. Apparently reading a book is quite a specific and somewhat unique experience that could not be easily mimicked by technology for a good while.
Then came e-ink and the dedicated e-reader – not the perfect substitute for a book but one that was damn well closer to the experience than a laptop. Lightweight, easy on the eyes and compact the dedicated e-reader had all the essentials except maybe easy access to content and a means to distribute it.
And then came Amazon; with a dedicated device, brand recognition and a growing e-library behind them Amazon hit all the right notes at just the right time. Pricing was high to begin with – the first Kindle was priced at $399 – but quickly came down with the Kindle 3 retailing from $139. Many eBooks for sale on Amazon have had extremely attractive pricing with many retailing well below the paperback price. Content was not really an issue when Amazon cleverly offered very easy ways to create eBooks for their store. The floodgates were opened, not just for publishers but for self publishing authors as well.
By the mid noughties I’d say publishers were already mentally preparing to go digital – it was going to happen soon. Amazon, with the Kindle, was the catalyst that finally got the whole thing going. By 2008 e-readers, distributers and eBooks were popping up everywhere in most of the English speaking world. At this stage so much was changing so fast – devices, formats, general standards – it was hard to say where a publisher should focus their time and money.
Four years on and the industry has a slightly better handle on things. However, there is still a lot of floundering and uncertainty; for a publisher it feels like the individual options for each step – conversion, distribution, social media/marketing – are endless! Then there are all the nitty gritty bits like tax and charges that nobody seems to have grasped yet. There is also a grudging acceptance that some of the workforce may have to have a very different skill set than are currently available. There are still a lot of hot topics, such as pricing and DRM/piracy, that may never permanently settle.
It’s still a bit tentative and overwhelming but also incredibly exciting. So I’d like to thank Amazon for the pivotal role it has played in the shaking up of the publishing industry; pulling it kicking and screaming into very interesting times.
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