Quote:
Originally Posted by GlenBarrington
Isn't Amazon already a major publisher? I don't see the benefit to them of buying a sick dead tree publisher.
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Yes and no.
Year old ranking:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...ublishers.html
Remember, Amazon doesn't publicize ebook sales and, because of the B&N/ABA boycott the only B&M stores consistently carrying APub is AmazonBooks stores. All dozen or so.
They account for maybe 10% of ebook sales on Kindle but zero elsewhere so figure maybe 8% of the ebook market. Online print sales, they run 0.4% so when it comes to print sales they rank more like a micro press.
Another way to look at it is number of titles published per year: the randy Penguin has been putting out 15-17,000 titles a year, while Amazon is growing into the very low thousands (2000?).
So, they're big compared to BAEN's 80 books a year or so, but not big enough to match even Hachette. Not yet, anyway.
If their full numbers were known tbey'd probably rank somewgere between Scholastic and Sterling (B&N). Almost certainly closer to Scholastic but that's a guess. Now, profitability, they probably rank in the top five but that is more a reflection of the problems at Hachette, HMH, etc.
There would be real value for Amazon to buy S&S and improve their iffy finances. Hachette, not so much. (Got to remember that Hachette US is the old Warner Books operation plus a bunch of corpses they've bought up since. There's a few jewels but in general their portfolio is pretty poor compared to the other big US publishers.)
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