Publishers ‘R Us
I've been doing a lot of thinking about electronic publishing these days, especially since I received an Amazon Kindle 2 as a gift in late February. The race appears to be on in electronic publishing. Demand for e-readers has reached out to cell phone owners with wireless providers, and it may have reached a tipping point, which is why every week there are articles like these in the popular press. Some of these would-be publishers and distributors will definitely find the competition so stiff that they will be forced to drop out of the market, especially since it appears that some of these companies believe it's still early in the race. What interests me about the whole competition is that Amazon has quietly led a revolution and now a whole host of companies are fighting for belated bragging rights. While it may become a wild race to the finish for companies who risk entering this high-stakes race, I'm hoping the competition will do wonders for consumers. I cannot wait for the catalog of human knowledge to be available over some advanced wireless network. NOTE: This post first appeared on my closed blog PROSELADY and is reproduced here in its entirety.
If you don't believe me, take a look at these wholly-owned subsidiaries of Amazon:
Amazon is vying to be the distributor of choice for electronic books, music, and film. And they have given artists a way to eliminate the arbiters of taste (companies and industries who select, groom, edit and distribute artistic works). CreateSpace allows the talent to go directly to the public, using Amazon as the distributor. Amazon also owns Mobipocket, an e-book creator and a mobile reader for the masses. And if authors want some help, BookSurge is there to provide traditional services, such as editing and promotion. That's a bold move, and extremely risky. But in the short-term, it may very well be that the only publisher you as an author, filmmaker, or musician, will need is your own initiative. "Publishers 'R Us", with Amazon as our collective distribution channel.
Amazon has become the electronic and physical book distributor that no publisher can ignore, especially since the advent of the Kindle and the use of Whispernet, its agreement with Sprint to deliver content wirelessly to customers for free. I'm incredibly impressed at Jeff Bezos' behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Working with Sprint while it's down on its luck was likely a contract negotiated to mutual benefit, but Amazon's stands benefit beyond Sprint's most compelling fantasies. Other wireless companies are wondering how to get in on these new streams of income invented by Amazon (yes, I mean providing content wirelessly over "Whispernet"), since the cell phone industry is maturing. That's why we're seeing a Kindle client for the iPhone, Mobipocket available for Blackberry, not to mention Google's plans for Android, and so on. Frankly, I expect this market to become more chaotic in the short term, with lawsuits abounding and dozens of players trying to shoulder their ways into some piece of the market.
It's hard not to argue that Amazon is leading this pack, probably to the dismay of other electronics companies, wireless companies, and publishers alike. If we see a number of publishers dragging their collective feet to enter this race, could be because they've neglected to stay fit enough to jump the hurdles over the huge obstacles of digital rights, poaching, and outright theft. The music industry has gone this way before them, with plenty of difficult lessons learned. Amazon may have solved the problems while traditional publishers were sitting on the sidelines. Only time will tell.
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