To me they are one and the same: e-book reader = Amazon Kindle. But there are many other existing options for e-books including the Apple iPad and the Nook. How did the Kindle become one of the more dominant and successful providers of e-books and e-readers?
I am ashamed (or proud?) to admit that I am a loyal Amazon customer. Amazon is almost a curse word in the print publishing world, representing all that is evil in the world, but especially predatory pricing.
This rivalry can probably be best summed up by an encounter related by George Packer of The New Yorker in his op-ed on Amazon. Roger Doeren of Rainy Day Books met Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at BookExpo America back in 1995, sitting by a sign that declared a young Amazon as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” and the following conversation ensued:
“Where is Earth’s biggest bookstore?”
“Cyberspace,” Bezos replied.
“We started a Web site last year. Who are your suppliers?”
“Ingram, and Baker & Taylor.”
“Ours, too. What’s your database?”
“Books in Print.”
“Ours, too. So what makes you Earth’s biggest?”
“We have the most affiliate links”—a form of online advertising.
Doeren considered this, then asked, “What’s your business model?”
Bezos said that Amazon intended to sell books as a way of gathering data on affluent, educated shoppers. The books would be priced close to cost, in order to increase sales volume. After collecting data on millions of customers, Amazon could figure out how to sell everything else dirt cheap on the Internet. (Amazon says that its original business plan “contemplated only books.”).
Afterward, Doeren told his partner at Rainy Day Books, Vivien Jennings, “I just met the world’s biggest snake-oil salesman. It’s going to be really bad for books.”
Packer condemns, but also at the same time praises, Bezos’s business model. Extreme supporters of online book retailers and publishers claim that classic print publishers are a relic of the past, even that they do not have the customer’s best interests at heart when setting prices or delivering the books that they demand.
The Telegraph put out a rough timeline of e-books back in 2010, marking the beginning at the launch of Project Gutenberg back in 1971. Its next mark is in 1993 when Digital Book Inc. offers its customers a floppy disk containing 50 e-books, two years before Amazon begins selling printed books online. Amazon stuck with this format for a relatively long time—The Telegraph puts some of the first e-book reader sales in 1998, and Amazon didn’t launch its Kindle e-reader until 2007.
Apparently, Amazon had built enough of a customer base that they didn’t have to worry about being late to the e-reader party. According to Joe Roberts of Trusted Reviews, “Amazon’s first e-reader, only released in the US, sold out in five and a half hours and remained unavailable for five months. It seems people at the time couldn’t wait to pay the $400 necessary to get their hands on this bulky contraption with its strange slanted keyboard and angled edges.” I don’t remember the launch of the Kindle as a big wow moment in my personal history, but my mom, my dad, and I all own different versions of the Amazon Kindle. It’s like an insidious e-book invasion. Jeff Bercovici of Forbes isolated the numbers from the impassioned rhetoric of Packer’s article, reporting that 19.5% of all books sold in the U.S. are Kindle titles—and this was in 2014. And this article was published just months before the launch of Kindle Unlimited, an e-book subscription service for $9.99/month. This is actually more expensive than two other competing services, Scribd and Oyster.
Yet I am a subscriber to Amazon Prime and Amazon Unlimited. I buy into the perceived convenience. Perhaps I’m finally realizing the monopoly and monopsony that is Amazon. Will I stop buying from them? Probably not.
You must be logged in to post a comment.