The Changing Face Of Publishing Books And E-Books
Online retail giant, Amazon, was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos and the original Amazon website launched in 1995. Today Amazon is an extremely successful business and one of the best recognised and most trusted brands on the planet. It’s easy to forget what an unusual concept ordering books online and having them shipped by mail was at the time. There were plenty investors and business analysts who predicted that Amazon would have a difficult time of it - and indeed it took until the end of 2001 before Amazon were able to report their first profit.
Having changed the way that many people bought books, Amazon diversified into other areas very quickly. Audio CDs, video, consumer electronics, computer software and toys were all additions to Amazon’s portfolio. Today you can buy almost any consumer item that you can think of from Amazon - including your groceries.
In addition to growing their product range, Amazon set up further websites in the UK, France, Germany, China and Canada. Nevertheless, they maintained their original passion for books and they still had, in the eyes of the public, a very strong link with book sales.
This strong link with books would serve them well in November 2007 when they launched the original Kindle e-book reader. Having already changed the method of buying books, Amazon was now altering the way that the books were read. The Kindle attracted a great deal of publicity and it’s reasonable to suggest that the e-book reader market took off exponentially when Amazon released their updated and enhanced Kindle 2.0 in February of 2009.
Amazon followed up with the large display Kindle DX reader in June of the same year. This boasted a bigger e-ink technology display screen and was targeted at readers of newspapers, magazines and academic textbooks. Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, a lot of the publicity surrounding the DX was produced from the world of academic publishing - a sector often thought of as a little conservative, not to say staid.
So, the methods used to buy, deliver and ship books have all been changed in a relatively short period of time. The last piece of the jigsaw - publishing - will almost certainly undergo considerable modification also. In future, publishing houses will probably produce an e-book edition of any new books released. The long established method of releasing a hardback version followed by a paperback edition a few months after will be updated by the addition of an e-book version, probably right at the beginning of the cycle.
Considering the fact that publishing e-books costs very much less than a conventional print run, it could be that publishers are more inclined to publish lesser known authors in the future. Perhaps more authors may decide to take more control by self publishing in future. At the moment, anyone who has an Amazon account and can operate Microsoft Word, for example, can publish a Kindle book for free (and receive a 70% share of the sales price). Amazon, this time using e-book readers as a vehicle, continues to make big changes in the world of books.