Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
We mind the arrows, but we are hungry and have a drive to succeed. And, as you said, we are not constrained. The only unfortunate part of what is going on with Amazon now, is that Amazon is becoming part of the constraint with its insistence on "exclusivity." I understand the business reasons for it, but I loathe the practice.
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Well, with KU I'm thinking the exclusivity part might be to *discourage* publishers from jumping enmasse into KU. The idea is for KU to supplement and reinforce sales without seriously cannibalizing them, which it can do nicely at 20% the size of the full Kindle catalog. For all the handwringing in the publishing press, there is no indication Amazon intends or even wants to replace sales with subscriptions.
Even a cursory glance at the available numbers says it's not doable: best estimates have Amazon at about 50M active accounts generating $1.5-1.8B in sales which is a lot closer to $30 per account than $120. Assuming a nominal pareto distribution (80/20) suggests that at most 20% of readers would benefit from KU if it offered the full 3Million book Kindle catalog, which would only bring in $1.2B in subscription revenue. Added to the $300M or so in sales from the rest of the accounts would make it, at best, a wash. At worst, a $200-300M decline in revenue. And that assumes the heavy users stay subscribed all year long instead of popping in and out a few months at a time.
No way does Amazon want all kindle ebooks on KU.
What they want, in the best case, is a representative sample of every author and series. And for that purpose, exclusivity pays off in spades for both sides.
(It is like the exclusive pre-order bonuses many of the high profile console games offer: pre-order at Best Buy and get one set of optional DLC, pre-order at Walmart, Amazon, or Gamestop and get a different one at each. The basic games, of course, is exactly the same everywhere.)