Amazon to the Brits – Digitize your books!
By Paul Biba
Here’s an excerpt from UK publication The Bookseller.
Amazon’s Genevieve Kunst has urged “all publishers” to get digitising if the UK is “ever” to see the launch of the Kindle device. …
But Kunst explained: “We launched in the US with 90,000 e-books available – we waited until we had reached a critical mass. We want to be able to offer an equally good selection if the Kindle is ever to come into the UK.”
Kunst added the current catalogue of available e-books was “not robust” and as a result it would be “hard to encourage people to buy devices”.
In conversation with The Bookseller after the event, she said: “In general, UK publishers should be digitising content. The most important thing is making sure we have the best customer offering possible, and the best user experience.
March 10th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
As reported, those are strange remarks, remarks that perhaps reflect just how self-obsessed Amazon’s upper management is becoming.
Amazon’s Kunst assumes that UK publishers want both Amazon and Kindle to be a success. Many would probably be happy to see both fail. The UK doesn’t have the 1930s-era laws we have in the US that keep large booksellers from bullying publishers into giving them special pricing. Amazon is reportedly already taking advantage of that, demanding below-wholesale pricing from publishers who dare to compete with Amazon by selling their own books online at a discount.
And, rightly or wrongly, many publishers are dubious about ebooks, particularly proprietary schemes like Amazon’s that might lock them into having only one outlet for their ebooks, with Amazon dictating what their share will be. Note especially this remark:
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In conversation with The Bookseller after the event, she said: “In general, UK publishers should be digitising content. The most important thing is making sure we have the best customer offering possible, and the best user experience.
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This Amazon exec assumes that “the most important thing” is that others, in this case independent UK publishers, shape their businesses to suit Seattle-based Amazon, ensuring that, “we have the best customer offering possible, and the best user experience.” It is really necessary to point out that publishers have their own businesses, that they’re not mere extensions of Amazon?
I believe narcissistic is the term psychologists use for people who think the world revolves around them. Amazon seems to be developing a culture of corporate narcissism.