So You Want A Fandom [#Publishing] [#MarketResearch]

Amazon Opens The Floodgates: 2007-2010

During the years 2007 through 2010, Jeff Bezos and his team at Amazon did several things which would cause a sea change throughout the publishing industry. Taken each on their own, these business decisions probably looked innocuous. But they collected into a tidal wave which washed over the industry and changed the nature of books and content curation.

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First, in August 2007, Amazon launched a way for independent authors to sell their print books directly through Amazon's online bookstore, without any middlemen or barriers. Amazon had purchased several print-on-demand services in prior years, and they chose one of these, CreateSpace, to integrate with their online bookstore. 

Unlike vanity presses, CreateSpace would not charge the author any fees, yet it enabled your book to be listed in the world's biggest online bookstore. This undermined the appeal of vanity presses such as iUniverse.  

Amazon made another smart business decision by charging a listing fee to print-on-demand catalogs outside the Amazon umbrella, such as Lulu. In other words, forget Lulu. Forget iUniverse. If you wanted your print book to show up on Amazon's already-market-dominant online bookstore, Amazon's CreateSpace was suddenly the most attractive option.

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In November 2007, Amazon introduced Kindle Direct Publishing, known as Amazon KDP, along with its first generation e-reader.

Now authors could sell virtual books—ebooks—directly through Amazon, without any middlemen or barriers or third parties. You could only sell your ebooks in the United States, but that was a large marketplace. 

The Amazon Kindle e-reader turned out to be cutting edge. It used e-ink, a new technology which cut down on screen glare. Thanks to e-ink, you could read a Kindle in bright sunlight, on the beach. The Kindle had few buttons, making it more intuitive and easier to figure out than competing e-readers. People began to desire Kindles. Not just tech-savvy Silicon Valley programmers, but teenagers and grandmas wanted them as well. They made great gifts.

Even book reviewers and book clubs were going digital. Goodreads overtook LibraryThing as the social media of choice for bookworms.

By 2009, Amazon had complete dominance over the rapidly growing digital marketplace for ebooks. It owned 90% of the ebook market. It cemented its digital dominance with the acquisition of Audible. Now it owned 90% of the marketplace for audiobooks as well. Soon it would integrate all three formats—ebooks, audiobooks, and print books—by introducing WhisperSync, so that readers could keep their place across multiple formats of the same book.

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As for print...

Amazon signaled strong interest in the future of print with its purchase of AbeBooks in December 2008. AbeBooks was (and still is) the predominant site for buyers and sellers of rare and out-of-print books. This purchase also gave Amazon a stake in LibraryThing, a precursory competitor to Goodreads.

Borders struggled to imitate the Amazon business model by incorporating a print-on-demand service. It signed a deal with Lulu in 2009. However, their online catalogs lacked the easy search and also-bought recommendation algorithms which made Amazon dominant. Their audiobook marketplace could not complete with Audible, and for ebook fans, they were not selling anything as nifty as the Kindle. The last year Borders had turned a profit was 2006. It was in a precipitous decline.

Barnes & Noble fared better than Borders, premiering its Nook e-reader device in 2009. Although the Nook could not quite gain as much traction as the Kindle, it relied on the popular Android operating system. And Barnes & Noble had cultivated a loyal customer base. They would survive the next few years.