You have to wonder just how many books Amazon Encore has to publish before we consider it a fully fledged book publisher? I wrote a long post about the implications of Amazon Encore here some time ago. In it I said:
Sure this can be extended and it is clearly being set up to do so. Amazon is in a great place to carry out their program to almost any conceivable scale. That in itself should indicate that they intend to extend. If you don’t believe it look at what Barnes & Noble have done in Classics and Rediscovered titles and you will get the idea.
But add to it the previously mentioned POD set up, they wouldn’t even need to expend extra capital on print runs, they’d be able to deliver books on demand so even if a huge proportion of the titles failed, their costs would be lower than the major publishers and the bookstore publishers too. That competitive advantage would be added to the fact that they wouldn’t have to pay a retailers discount unless they were selling to the retailers themselves. In effect, aside from what the author and their agents can grab from the chain, Amazon with Encore has successfully placed itself in control of the entire value chain of which I wrote some more about last week but didn’t quite count this in.
And now, quelle surprise, Amazon has expanded the encore program by 300%! I’ll admit from 1 to 3 is not a huge leap, but if every season (twice a year say) they leap 300% by the end of 2012 they would be publishing over 2000 titles. Of course that is an exaggeration I doubt that Amazon will expand the division at that speed but even at a lesser pace they could easily be publishing 100, 200, 300 titles a season.
Are we ready for that? I don’t think we are.
Eoin
Filed under: Authors, Books, Business, Future of Books, Future of Publishing, Publishing, Agents, Amazon, Amazone Encore, Book Deals, Business, Print, Print On Demand
Hmmm the retailers are continuing to wag the dog. I wonder when the other end of the chain gets smart enough to sell direct and cut the retailer out?
To be fair, some have, but then again it requires quite the direct sales operation to enable a publisher to do without Amazon sales!
Eoin
I’m not ready for it.
I stopped buying from Amazon some time ago (I’m sure their hearts are broken lol)
[...] thoughts on Amazon Encore Expansion Posted on November 22, 2009 by switch11 Eoin Purcells talks about the addition of 3 new titles to Amazon Encore and has some really good thoughts, including [...]