Reactive Bookselling Brought to You by the Jeff Bezos Amazon School of Management
The next place you'll be able to buy Kindle is at the airport. Amazon (AMZN) and HMSHost just inked an exclusive deal to sell the e-readers to travelers making their way through eleven cities at Simply Books and Authors bookshops. The fact that this took nearly three years to happen is just one more sign that CEO Jeff Bezos is now in serious reactive management mode.
Last week I reported that Amazon dropped the price of Kindle to $189, a sawbuck less than Barnes & Noble's (BKS) Nook. Though Bezos stayed mum at the time, he did grant an interview to Fortune in which he said he doesn't view the iPad, or tablet devices overall, as a threat, "It's really a different product category."
Bezos also claimed that Amazon's switch to the agency model (publishers set the retail price and the bookseller gets a 30 percent cut) isn't going to hurt a bit because he believes publishers who set the prices too high are already experiencing a share shift.
These statements are in sharp contrast to digging in his heels and pulling Macmillan's titles from direct sale on the site. But they're also inexplicably author-centric especially since pulling books hits authors right in the royalties.
However, reactive is better than inactive. Bezos is finally paying attention to the writing on the wall and it's not a moment too soon. Apple's (APPL) iPad (even if it is in a whole other league) continues its onslaught of sales -- 3 million in about 2.5 months -- and Amazon stock is tumbling alongside.
Meanwhile, though Barnes & Noble stock is taking a bigger hit, the world's largest bookseller reported its online sales increased 24 percent to $573 million for the year. Chairman Leonard Riggio indicated this is going to be an area where B&N will invest heavily.
The explosive growth of digital books has created the most compelling opportunity in Barnes & Noble's history. We have found that Barnes & Noble Members, our best customers, have increased their combined physical and digital spend with us by 17 percent since purchasing a Nook, and by a phenomenal 70 percent in total units.
Bezos was smart to say Amazon's e-bookstore strategy is "buy once, read everywhere." The availability of Kindle reader for Android phones and its app for audio and video on iPhones and iPads were recent moves that will give the Kindle platform a (small) edge over Nook for now.
Perhaps the most compelling thing Bezos said --
The physical book -- is designed to disappear and get out of the way so you can enter the author's world. So when you're reading a physical paper book, you're not thinking about the ink and the glue and the stitching. All of those things vanish so you can focus on the author's words. The Kindle's designed to be the same so when you're reading, the whole device vanishes, so that you're left with the author's world.
-- may also be the most prescient. I've been saying for a while that it's the e-reading platform -- not the device itself -- that will be a game changer for digital publishing. If Bezos can manage to improve upon Kindle's e-reading platform -- and solve the pesky problem of digital rights management so books can be bought once and loaned everywhere -- then he'll really come out on top.
Image via Flickr user Etech05 CC 2.0
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