Amazon.com's Kindle: Publishing Industry's iPod?

ICMR regularly updates the list of free cases. To view more free cases, please visit our site at frequent intervals.

Publishing Business at Doldrums cont...

<< Previous Many established publishing houses - Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Borders; Barnes & Noble, etc., - are undergoing the strain of liquidity crunch as their revenues are diminishing. Though there is demand for college text books and professional reference books, the sales of trade books18 are comparatively less. The lack of profitability in trade book publishing made the publishers strongly believe that book publishing industry itself is an unprofitable business. Even the newspaper industry is suffering because of the vast free online content available on the net. A service called Pathfinder, allows users to read articles from Times, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly and Vibe. The revenues of the industry are hampered as more and more advertisers are shifting to the net where the fees for placing the ads is very less when compared to the print editions In the 21st century, the high costs incurred on manual publishing became a disadvantage for the publishing industry paving way for new breakthrough innovations.

A more advanced technology known as e-readers evolved to threaten the future of the publishing industry which is in the declining state. The introduction of e-readers set a new trend that heralded a new era of reading. E-reader enables access to a wide range of books, articles and magazines.

In 2006, Sony launched an e-book reader 'Sony PRS 500' followed by Amazon which launched an e-book reader named 'Kindle' in 2007. Their emergence pushed the survival of the entire print industry into chaos. The demand for e-readers which is still in the nascent stage is expected to grow in the near future. Few analysts, however, opine that e-readers, though on one hand are considered as the cannibals' of the publishing industry; are indeed devices that would change the face of publishing. Though the number of readers has not declined in the era of computerization, the way people are reading has taken a drastic shift. People are opting more and more to read of the screen rather than from a printed copy.

Amazon's Product Extension: From e-tailing to e-reading

In 1994, Jeff Bezos (Bezos) gave up an attractive career as a financial analyst in D.E. Shaw & Co. with an ambition to start business. Realizing the revenue-generation potential of the World Wide Web (then in a booming stage), he came up with a novel business plan of selling books online. In 1995, he launched Amazon.com, an online vendor of books that enlisted books under all categories to be sold through its website. This website provided the necessary information regarding the publishing house, price of the product, etc.

Next >>

---

18]Trade book is another way of describing published literature, the kind often referred to as library books.