Matteo Berlucci of Anobii is calling on publishers to go around Amazon and sell direct to consumers:
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When Pottermore launched their ebook store at the end of March, the publishing industry stood still and watched in amazement. Pottermore did something that no one had dared trying before: they forced Amazon to send customers to their site to buy their ebooks.
Some publishers had been thinking about it in the past but concerns about the consequences this could have created to their revenues in case Amazon disapproved and retaliated proved too big to overcome. Controlling the purchasing stage of the user journey is extremely valuable not from a financial but from a strategic point of view: who sells the ebook owns the relationship with the customer.
Pottermore showed that if you are big enough you can actually do it. This precedent is extremely important as it has shown to publishers that if they were to go down this route they could potentially succeed in shifting the power form the retailers back to them.
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Analysis by Mike Shatzkin and comments
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Money quote:
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The question for the first publisher that wants to try this will be whether the power of a Big Six publisher to compel Amazon to play along is as great as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise. It’s a really scary thing for them to do. After all, Rowling had zero digital revenue to protect and zero responsibility to anybody else for delivering it. All the major publishers have triple digit millions of dollars of Kindle revenue at stake and thousands of authors counting on them to deliver it.
But with Barnes & Noble now funded (by Microsoft) for battle for the next several years and Kobo and Apple committed to the fight as well, there’s a serious question as to whether Amazon would feel as comfortable going forward without one of the Big Six’s ebooks the way they have been willing to work without those from IPG.
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My take? Macmillan has already put its oar in the water going DRM free with Tor.com and its already successfully faced down Amazon once. I predict Macmillan and maybe Penguin will go for it in the next 2 years. Anyone in the UK knows anything about Bertolucci? Discuss