More On How To Beat Amazon

A web dev has a long, thoughtful piece on how to beat Amazon:

Today is not tomorrow (or, how to beat Amazon) – Baldur Bjarnason.

His idea is (among other things) to have publishers create their own open ecosystem which can be exploited freely by retailers. Select quote: “You don’t want half a dozen ebook retailers competing with Amazon. You want thousands.”

The problem with that is how it affects readers. Too much choice is just as bad as no choice at all. Having a dozen physical bookstores in town provides me with a different flavor of choice than a dozen (or a dozen dozen) online bookstores. That said, if each online publisher talks to the same set of APIs and becomes outlets towards the same set of products, then the game becomes less about what’s in stock and more about customer satisfaction.

The other problem is … publishers, who continue to involve themselves with technology only when threatened to do so by Amazon-level competition (read: extinction). They still seem to think they can get out of all this by doing as little as humanly possible.

Serdar Yegulalp Serdar Yegulalp (110 Posts)


  • Steven Savage

    And this is where you point out – “doing as little as humanly possible” is the problem. A  lot of publishers are used to a simple, mechanical model, NOT innovation.  Now they have to innovate, and that’s work. It’s not in the organizational DNA.

    • Scott D

      And outside their norms,  They should have been looking at ebooks as soon as the tech became possible, but the decision makers may have been looking at something so far out of their experience that they didn’t even have a baseline.

      Thus, a reason to have on staff friendly geeks.

    • http://www.genjipress.com/ Serdar (GenjiPress)

      It’s all the more depressing when it’s a publisher you know and respect. E.g., New Directions, who have a Twitter account but still no e-book versions of anything. The most understanding side of me wants to believe that’s because they don’t want to screw their own writers by diving into e-books “too early”, but I’m starting to wonder if there is such a thing anymore.

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