Amazon is working hard to become an e-book publisher, and thereby compete with the established publishers, who also happen to be some of its biggest suppliers, TechFlash writes.
Amazon's Kindle, both as a device and a platform, are runaway successes, and they're clearly the future of the book. And Amazon as publisher has always been at the heart of the Kindle platform, where anyone can self-publish and sell Kindle books, with Amazon taking a cut.
But now Amazon is going beyond that, hiring a top publishing executive and starting an office in New York, and going aggressively after best-selling authors.
Amazon is announcing imprints for books under a variety of verticals like young adult fiction, business and general non-fiction, often with best-selling authors.
This is a risky move for Amazon, because its paper book retailing business is huge and so it's alienating important suppliers, but it's the right move for the following reasons:
- It's a huge opportunity;
- Publishers are going to hate Amazon for doing Kindle no matter what Amazon does;
- Most importantly, at this point the publishers need Amazon more than Amazon needs the publishers. If publishers stop letting Amazon selling their books, they'll suffer more than Amazon.
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