What Would Happen if Amazon Ruled Publishing?

It would be published as a simple PDF or mobile-friendly ebook format on the open web. Or, you know, just blogged.

Or sold as an app on iOS and Android.

Or sold by Pragmatic Publishers, or O'Reilly, or any of the other similar small publishers that will soon be all over the landscape, particularly in the all-electronic publishing era.

Or sold by Barnes and Noble. Does anybody remember Barnes and Noble?

Who knows, maybe Facebook or Google will start an e-publishing arm. Wouldn't be too difficult.

One shouldn't minimize Amazon's mighty marketing power, or their mighty infrastructure, or their customer goodwill, or their good hardware, or the extent to which they have a good eye in a market where everyone else is blind. And these things are going to continue to give them a mighty share of the publishing industry, because writers and vendors go where the money is. But they don't have a monopoly, and I don't see how they have an incipient monopoly, because publishing text is so easy that it literally can't be stopped by major governments.

Free speech would not apply as it's not government --but PR would suffer if they did restrict content, I think.

Still, I think if they decided to get into the business of gatekeeper, the gov (and the public) would want to investigate their actions --whether it would be legally actionable I have no idea. I think it would be foolish of them to go in that direction --it would be an opportunity for a smaller player to establish themselves as the non-paternalistic alternative.

Amazon sells an uncountable number of products because other companies make those products. Amazon cannot make all those products themselves.

Similarly, Amazon cannot shepherd within an order of magnitude the same number of more or less worthwhile books into the market as current publishers are doing today.

"Self publish yadda yadda whatever." Yes, Amazon will offload much of the production of books to the authors. And yes, Amazon can just say "yes" and print any book on demand. Paradoxically, I have a lot of books actually available to me because publishers have acted as gatekeepers/curators. I can't possibly find as many mostly-self-published printed on demand or kindle Amazon books worth my attention as I can currently by choosing from the pre-filtered publisher-produced books of now.

</old man>

The latter is what I think will - and in my opinion should - happen if Amazon and/or Apple ended up in a monopolistic/duopolistic position with their ebook/pad gadgets while keeping a strict control over what can be sold there. Which is probably what Amazon is trying to do, but in the long run I don't think that would be sustainable (either by market forces or government intervention).

So for publishers the long term real issue is most likely to be how to add value as (mostly) digital publishers, but not how to survive against a monopoly.

This gives me an idea: use the readers as editors. For every mistake found, offer $0.X rebate off their next book by the author.

If it sells they make money - laugh at that suckers!

If it doesn't sell then nobody read it.

As some heavy metal band said about their albums being burned in the bible belt - "Those sales still count for the charts"!