Internet Marketing

In 1994 Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, the online retail giant. Shortly afterwards, in 1995, Amazon’s original website went live. Amazon is now one of the most recognisable and trusted brands in the world – it’s an extremely successful and profitable business. So it’s easy to forget just what an innovative idea buying books on the web and then having them delivered by mail was back then. Many investors and industry analysts predicted that Amazon would struggle, or even fail, during its early years. It wasn’t until the back end of 2001, six years after going live, that Amazon reported a profit for the first time.

Having changed the way that many people bought books, Amazon diversified into other areas very quickly. Audio CDs, video, consumer electronics, computer software and toys were all additions to Amazon’s portfolio. Today you can buy almost any consumer item that you can think of from Amazon – including your groceries.

In parallel with the expansion of their product range, Amazon launched additional websites in Germany, France, the UK, Canada and China. However, they never lost their original passion for books and retained a very strong association with book selling in the opinion of the buying public.

This was something that would stand them in good stead in November of 2007 when the Amazon Kindle e-book reader launched. Having previously changed the way that books were purchased, Amazon was now modifying the way that books were actually read. The Kindle reader got a lot of publicity and it’s fair to say that e-book readers really took off with the launch of Amazon’s upgraded Kindle 2.0 in February of 2009.

The large display Kindle DX reader was launched in June of the same year. This incorporated a large (9.7″) e-ink display and was intended to appeal to readers of newspapers, magazines and academic textbooks. A great deal of the excitement generated by the release of the DX originated from the normally very traditional world of academic publishing.

So, the manner in which books are bought, delivered and read have all been radically modified in a relatively short time frame. The last piece of the reading jigsaw – publishing – is also likely to change in the near future. Any major publisher will almost certainly require to publish an e-book version of any new editions in future. The well established process of hardback publication, followed a few months later by the paperback version will be altered by the insertion of an e-book version at the front end of the cycle.

Given that publishing e-books is considerably less expensive than a traditional print run, it’s possible that publishing houses may be encouraged to take a chance on less well established authors in future. It may be that more authors will decide to cut out publishers altogether and go down the self publishing route. In fact, publishing books for the Amazon Kindle is very simple and can be done for free by anyone who has an Amazon account and is able to use Microsoft Word.

Learn more about the Amazon Kindle and see the full range of Kindle accessories available to help you customise and protect your reader.