The Amazon Kindle Reader – The Death Of Vanity Publishing?
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 way in which books are purchased, delivered and even read have all been fundamentally changed in a fairly short period of time. The final piece of the jigsaw – publishing – is also likely to evolve in the near future. Large publishing houses will certainly want to produce an e-book version of any new publications in future. The traditional process of hardback release followed by the paperback edition a few months later will be modified by the inclusion of an e-book edition right at the front end of the cycle.
Since publishing e-books is less costly than either hardback or paperback release publishing houses may be encouraged to be more daring in future. It may well mean that a greater number of new authors are published due to the fact that the process is cheaper and therefore involves less financial risk. It could prompt more authors to take greater control by self publishing. In fact, publishing Kindle books is, even now, an achievable goal for anyone who has an Amazon account and who can operate simple word processing software such as Microsoft Word. E-book readers are a true revolution in both reading and publishing.
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