Jeff Bezos

Remember the “info snacking” phrase that was somewhat buzzworthy several years ago? The thinking was that everyone was too focused on reading short bursts of content and soon no one would have the attention span to read an entire book. In fact, info snacking was one of the terms Jeff Bezos mentioned when the Kindle […]

The post Blinkist and the ‘read less, learn more’ movement appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

It was originally billed as "Earth's Biggest Bookstore" and featured over one million titles. Twenty years later it boasts over 270m active accounts and claimsto have more than 2m third-party vendors selling millions of products through the marketplace platform. In that time it has been both lauded and vilified, most recently over corporation tax and staff working conditions but Amazon is quite clearly one of the biggest success stories of online commerce. So what has been its lasting impact? Can it maintain this growth or have we seen the best of it?

Remember the "info snacking" phrase that was somewhat buzzworthy several years ago? The thinking was that everyone was too focused on reading short bursts of content and soon no one would have the attention span to read an entire book. In fact, info snacking was one of the terms Jeff Bezos mentioned when the Kindle launched; he suggested that the Kindle would encourage more deeply engaging, long-form reading.

One difficulty that inhibits the growth of book publishing companies is that they think of themselves as book publishing companies, selling books through bookstores (bricks and clicks) and to perhaps to libraries. However, the advent of Amazon.com, ebooks, social media, and more demanding customer expectations challenges that philosophy. In order to compete, publishers need to explore new revenue opportunities and marketing strategies.

This past Tuesday, the SF&F (Science Fiction and Fantasy) legend and notorious literary feather-ruffler continued her long campaign against Amazon, this time, as explicitly as possible, via a blog post entitled "Up the Amazon with the BS Machine or Why I keep Asking You Not to Buy Books from Amazon."

In it, she immediately declares that she and Amazon "are not at war." With that said, she proceeds to insist her indifference with regards to Amazon as a house goods supplier or even tool for those looking to self-publish

Amazon isn't your competition because they sell your product. They are your competition because they already own your customer.

Amazon is your competition for one reason only: attention. Amazon already has your customer in their store. Your customer is already browsing their aisles. Amazon will beat you, not because they have a better store than you, but because they have a bigger store than you. They sell enough things to already have your customer's attention. It doesn't matter if they came in to buy socks, if they're at all likely to buy your thing