Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
They would have been in a much better position if they had embraced ebooks and done this from the start. As it is, they have allowed Amazon to gain such dominance that they simply can't afford to cut Kindle users off, and it is going to be difficult for them to regain control.
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Life can be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. (Can you id that quote
?)
The publishers could not have foreseen the explosive rise of ebooks-largely because the rise was engineered, not by publishers but by tech companies.
Shatzkin (my guru!
) puts it this way:
Quote:
And that takes me back to the book business cork bobbing in the larger digital device stream. There was no ebook business to speak of until Amazon delivered the Kindle device, put massive muscle behind selling it, and used the ability they had then to sacrifice margin to create a powerful commercial proposition that was the catalyst to create the market. There was no serious competition for Amazon until Barnes & Noble’s new management delivered the Nook with an equally powerful commitment to establishing it, using their presence in stores to introduce ebook reading to new audiences and, with further innovation of the devices, contributing to the explosive growth of reading in digital formats.
There was no restraint on Amazon’s ability to use their deep pockets to discount publishers’ content in pursuit of their own market share growth until Apple’s new device, the iPad, created a whole new sales model that forced price stability in the marketplace and, at the same time, handed publishers a new capability to maximize revenue and to use price as a marketing tool.
There was no effective way to introduce book readers to the convenience of digital reading without the investment in a dedicated device until the iPad put the capability into millions of hands that didn’t know they wanted it.
There was no great motivation for ebook retailers to introduce interoperability across devices until many ebook device owners also became iPhone and iPad owners.
We note that all these changes in the marketplace were created by others, not by publishers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, or even a new thing. Publishers also didn’t spring for the investment that created superstores and then Amazon in the 1990s, all of which increased their sales. A publisher’s role is to use the channels that are available to get books into the hands of readers.
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Going forward, publishers may just have to create new channels to get books to readers, in order to avoid being disintermediated. That's where we are at.