Two New York Times articles caught my interest recently. While most news on the subject of digital literature usually focuses on E-book reading gadgets and hardware like Amazon’s “Kindle” and Sony’s “Reader”, these articles focused on the E-book market itself its potential suppliers. This of course is because most companies have approached the emerging market of digital literature by competing to create the dominant e-book reader that will win over consumers’ hearts. However, despite the fact that Amazon and its Kindle appear to lead this market, the company may be shifting gears and targeting the E-book market itself and its provision.
The biggest sign of this new focus comes from a New York Times article entitled “Amazon to Sell E-Books for Apple Devices” which was written by Brad Stone and published on March 4th, 2009. The article can be found HERE. This article describes Amazon’s recent move to supply E-books to other multimedia devices, primarily the popular Apple I-Phone, as a key indicator to the company’s newfound interest in becoming the top E-book provider. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Amazon has about 240,000 E-books for sale on Amazon.com, as reminded by the Times article.
One might ask why? Why would the company who has almost cornered the market on E-book readers and hardware suddenly shift their attention and potentially lose the Kindle’s role as top dog? I think one of the answers is fairly obvious. Being the key provider of E-books would certainly make Amazon the central player within the entire digital literature market. However, I think another important reason lies in the emerging competition from other companies. In the very near future it is inevitable that other companies will design and develop their own take on the E-Book reader. In fact, some already have and many of them stand potential to be more appealing to consumers due to their convergence with other multimedia. Iriver, for example has started some buzz over their new multimedia gadget called the “Libre”. The Libre is basically an E-book reader that also functions as an MP3 player and is expected to be a decent product due to iriver’s solid reputation. The most appealing part of the anticipated Libre is its convenient ability to read PDF text files, which are widely used amongst users today.. The Libre can be viewed HERE.
Lastly, I think the final key reason that Amazon aspires to be the primary provider of E-books is because they stand a very good chance to do for e-books what I-Tunes does for digital music. Yet there does appear to be a minor threat to Amazon’s potential conquest of the E-book market. Another New York Times article found HERE describes Barnes and Nobles recent acquisition of a fair sized, online e-book retailer. This spontaneous stock of e-book content placed Barnes Noble into play with the race to dominate the E-book market. However, what I found most significant about this article was the fact that Fictionwise (the recently acquired company by Barnes and Noble) “currently stocks 59,791 titles, according to a “stats” chart on its home page, and its prices are regularly more expensive than those sold on Amazon.com.” I think that the combination of Amazon’s substantially cheaper prices ($28 from B&N, $10 from Amazon) and their vastly more extensive library gives them a significant enough lead over competitors.
That is why I believe Amazon is redirecting their primary attention. If they continue in this manner they can crush competitors like B&N before they pose too much of a threat.
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