“In the online context, one can absolutely imagine one day publishers will provide books directly to consumers,” says Prof Edelman. Doing so could undermine Amazon’s market share and its buying power.
Some publishers agree. “We have to have a relationship with the consumer,” says Stephen Page, chief executive of British publisher Faber & Faber. “At London Book Fair this year, all the talk was about data.”
Understanding consumers’ habits could help publishers better decide what titles to acquire and how to market them. But there are obstacles. Even selling direct, publishers are unlikely to match Amazon’s prices. Individual houses also lack Amazon’s brand and range. “It’s very, very hard to create a destination site because we don’t represent the entirety of the market,” says Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer at HarperCollins, which started selling books direct to US consumers last month.
Benjamin Edelman recently argued that companies can deploy a number of strategies to attract customers directly to their websites, circumventing the dominating platform. While in some cases this could work, I am highly skeptical that this is going to happen in the e-book market. E-books need devices. The history of consumer products say that customers eventually concentrate on no more than 1-2 devices/standards/platforms. For e-books, it will probably be only one. No sane reader wants to have half of her book collection in a format and another half in another, with two devices needed to read all of her books. Publishers can easily attract readers to their websites, but they will need to make the e-book compatible with the dominant device. Which will be a Kindle (physically or as an app). You can complete the story yourself.
This looks as pretty easy stuff to me but Edelman is at Harvard Business School, so maybe I am missing something.
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