On Amazon

The growing dominance of Amazon in the bookselling and publishing world is bound to have an impact on the world of books, but that impact will be different for different sectors of the industry. Bookstores will be the hardest hit by the competition with the internet giant; Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Books a Million are all down in sales for the holiday season, while Amazon is doing fine. This trend will probably continue, at least as long as our current economic woes do. Amazon tends to be cheaper than any of the big box stores, even if you end up having to pay for shipping, which makes it the more economical choice. A big part of a physical bookstore's appeal is the ease of browsing around through the shelves and finding little treasures that you didn't know you were looking for, and that kind of browsing is something that people in an economic crunch will be less likely to do. For the bookstores, then, Amazon is a real problem.

I don't see Amazon as much of a direct threat to publishers. BookSurge is not a particularly attractive way to publish a POD book from a money-minded point of view; LightningSource is much more flexible and offers much better price points. For the self-publishers, there are plenty of other options, like Lulu, which offer terms at least as good as Amazon's. Even if Amazon offered the best terms for self-publishing, though, I don't think the large publishing houses would be that heavily impacted; there is a prestige to having a book accepted by a major publishing house, and that is part of the reason authors are reluctant to self-publish.

The ease of self-publishing in general (rather than Amazon in particular) will have consequences for smaller publishers. Much of what authors go to small publishers for--the book design, developmental and line edits--is widely available through freelancers. The one thing remaining that an author wants is marketing for their books, and small presses, I'm sure we can all agree, do not have the marketing clout of a place like HarperCollins. I would not be surprised at all to see more and more authors, particularly of regional interest books, opting to self-publish instead of going through a small publisher.

In the ebook arena, I think there is not much to worry about from Amazon. Their Kindle made a big splash when it came out, but many people are becoming disenchanted with it. The reason for that is one that I touched on briefly elsewhere: People do not want to have a half dozen gadget to carry around all the time. They want one thing, or perhaps two. We've seen this desire reflected clearly in the trend of cell phones becoming much, much more than just phones, and as more and more people get smart phones, more and more ebook traffic will go in that direction. If the iPhone remains the dominant smart phone on the market, we might have to start worrying about the impact they will have on what we read; they've already made it clear that they have no problems being ebook censors.