![]() ![]() And they were going to host unique content from brand name writers that wouldn’t be available anywhere else. They were going to let anybody create their own curated collection of books and profit from their curation. One is Zola Books, which started out two or three years ago promoting itself as a new kind of web bookstore. There are currently two noteworthy players in the market enabling any player with a web presence to have an ebookstore selling everybody’s titles. Bookish never had the juice to build up a real customer base and probably never could have, regardless of how much its owners would have been willing to invest. They get points for predicting the impasse, which Hachette famously suffered from during ebook contract negotiations with Amazon in 2014. By the time it opened, Bookish was touted as a “recommendation engine”, but its true purpose when it was started was to give its owning publishers a way to reach online consumers in case of an impasse with Amazon. That may have been behind the attempt by three publishers - Penguin (before the Random House merger), Hachette, and Simon & Schuster - to launch Bookish a few years ago. Trying to do retail for print books without a substantial infrastructure is just about impossible, but ebooks are tempting because, at least superficially, those challenges appear to be much smaller. One channel is shrinking the other is growing. As a result, Amazon has never been threatened as the online bookselling king.īarnes & Noble dominates physical retail for books Amazon owns online. And the Amazon discounting strategy, designed to suck sales away from terrestrial retailers and partly supported by Amazon’s reach well beyond books, was never a comfortable fit for BN. But they have not (to date) managed to achieve a synergistic interaction with the stores to give themselves a unique selling proposition. Barnes & Noble partnered with Bertelsmann in the 1990s to create Books Online, which has continued (to this day) as BN.com. Borders didn’t try, initially turning over its online presence to Amazon. When one company, a UK-based retailer called The Book Depository, organized itself to fulfill print books efficiently enough to be a potential competitor, Amazon bought them. The aggressive discounting by Amazon quickly and effectively scared off the terrestrial retailers who might have considered going into online sales. In fact, Amazon began life in 1995 leaning almost entirely on Ingram to supply its product and began discounting in earnest when Ingram started to extend the same capability to other retailers through a division called I2S2 (Ingram Internet Support Services) in the late 1990s. And when you get away from the owner of an ecosystem, the complications created by the perceived need for DRM - some ability to either lock up or identify the owner of content that might be “shared” beyond what its license (which is what a purchase of ebooks is) allows - makes things even more complicated.īecause it appears so superficially simple to transact with trusted customers, attempts to enable book and ebook sales by a wide variety of vendors are nearly as old as Amazon itself. On the ebook side, many readers are comfortable with specific platforms - Kindle, Nook, Kobo - and are uncomfortable “side-loading” content into them. ![]() They particularly don’t like it if suppliers compete on price.īut it isn’t just publishers who have trouble competing with the online book retailers and ebooks are just as hard as print. One is that their best retailer customers - Amazon and Barnes & Noble, of course, but many others as well - don’t like their turf encroached upon by their suppliers and they have power over their suppliers’ access to customers. There are a variety of reasons why direct sales are hard for publishers. You learn quickly that the two are often not the same. If you’re a marketer, you want to aim your messages where the decision gets made and you need to know if that wasn’t where the purchase was made. You don’t want to assume that the place somebody bought something (the last click) was the place they decided to buy it (attribution). There is a concept called “the fallacy of last click attribution” that is important in digital marketing. So however you learn about a book (or anything else), it is very easy to switch over to your vendor of choice to make the purchase. In the online environment, your favorite “store” - the one you’re loyal to and perhaps even have an investment in patronizing (which is how I’d characterize Amazon PRIME) - is only a click away. Although it has always seemed sensible for publishers to sell their books (and then ebooks) directly to end users, it has never looked to me like that could be a very big business.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |