booktwo.org

Another week, another interesting piece in the Times, which claims e-retailing, with Amazon.co.uk as its core exponent, is growing by 25-30% per year, expecting to make out at £10.3 billion when eBay, Tesco and the rest are all counted up. This is balanced by the slightly bizarre claim that “the market share of internet retailing [could be capped] at about 10%,” due to concerns about “after-sales service, a high rate of product return, and the pressure to make websites a more exciting experience for consumers.” In fact, these concerns (the first two at least) only really apply to electrical goods: the traditional big catalogue sellers - books, clothes, and increasingly food - are already inured to such problems.

As Amazon’s market share creeps over 20% - and Waterstone’s belatedly separates out its online retailing - the likelihood of Amazon entering the publishing business grows ever stronger. Such a move would allow them to hand-pick big authors for exclusive deals, and provide a home for the thousands - nay, millions - of unpublished authors desperate to get their books out but wary of the stigma of self-publishing: the real ‘long tail’ of the book industry. BookSurge is the start of this - ebooks must be the next stage.

Then again, they have to beat off IBM first.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 7:00 pm and is tagged with Online Retail. Here's a permanent link to this post, and the RSS feed for the comments. You can leave a comment below, or trackback from your own site.