Word: amazon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...question, Amazon is the most forward-thinking company in the book business. If there's a Steve Jobs of books, it's Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos. His vision is defining the way books will be bought and sold and written and read in the digital world - which is to say, the world. The question is whether there will be room in it for anyone besides Amazon...
...Perils of Verticality If you're a reader, you probably consider Amazon your friend. And it is. It recommends books to you and gets them to your door for cheap. But try shifting your point of view to that of a publisher and Amazon starts looking a bit scarier...
...Amazonians are really good at selling books online, and publishers love them for it. But because Amazon is so much better than anybody else at selling books online - last year, it owned 43% of that market, according to the bibliographic-information company R.R. Bowker - it has a lot of power at the negotiating table. All retailers get discounts from their wholesalers, but some publishers think the discounts Amazon asks for are getting too deep. "They're fast approaching the point where we just can't afford to do business with them," says a well-known New York book editor...
Publishing is a genteel business, and publishers aren't used to playing hardball. Amazon is, and it does. "I think it's fair to say there's some tension," says Jim Milliot, business and news director at Publishers Weekly. "They're the dominant online retailer. Publishers really aren't in the position to argue. Or to fight back." Last year, in a widely publicized scuffle, Amazon disabled its "Buy now with 1-click" button for some books published by Hachette's U.K. division after the companies disagreed about sales terms...
...whole digital revolution just makes things more complicated. For example: How much should an e-book cost? Right now, Amazon prices most of its Kindle editions at $9.99, which is quite a bit less than the cost of your average hardcover book. "In the digital-books world, a number of the costs are removed, so we believe they should be priced lower," says Russell Grandinetti, vice president of books for Amazon. "Our approach to digital books is that we will allow that to continue...