eBooks, Amazon and Oprah
It's been quite a week for Amazon. On Thursday they announced a revised projection for 4th quarter sales: somewhere between $6 and $7 billion. I don't care who you are; that is a LOT of money!
Before you start feeling sorry for them; consider that on Friday Oprah endorsed the Kindle. Called it a "life changing" product, no less! She says it changed her life and even says "It's absolutely my new favorite favorite thing in the world."
Oprah is, of course, a marketing machine and this endorsement is sure to help Amazon's bottom line. And you can be sure that publishers are hoping it helps them as well.
The thing that really strikes me is that when it comes to eBooks, Amazon has fixed it so that they realize revenue off of almost every eBook sold for portable devices. Take a look at the chart listing the various popular reading devices and the reading software that they use to read DRM protected eBooks.
| Adobe | eReader | Mobi | MS Reader | Propr- ietary | Palm | |
| BeBook | X | |||||
| Cybook | X | |||||
| iPhone | X | |||||
| Illiad | X | |||||
| Kindle | X | |||||
Nokia Phones | X | |||||
| Palm | X | X | ||||
| PocketPC | X | X | ||||
| SonyPRC | X | X |
Almost all of them use Mobipocket as the reader of choice. And just guess who owns Mobipocket. Amazon, or course. So, as long as publishers insist on using DRM on their titles, Amazon wins big!
It might be inaccurate to say that Jeff Bezos has bet the farm on digital reading, but however you look at it, he has certainly hedged his bets!
This is very good for Jeff and Amazon, I am not so sure that it that good for authors, publishers or even readers. Amazon is in the extraordinary position of control both access to the market (authors and publishers) and product placement in the market (readers). It always makes me nervous when any company has that much control (or even influence) in a particular market.
No comments:
Post a Comment