The late 1990s brought us Jeff Bezos, who pioneered a new e-commerce model and changed the dynamics of book sales for good. What Bezos failed to do, however, was change the dynamics of book publishing itself.
The 2000s brought us Steve Jobs (again), who pioneered music sales and changed the dynamics of the music industry for good. While conventional wisdom states that the music industry is dying, that is actually not true. Quoting MSFT’s J Allard, who runs Zune:
The music industry is very healthy. The record industry is the problem. The notion that the only way to monetize artist creation is 10 songs that come out every 18 months, in a package called an album — the classic record model — isn’t what it used to be. [Musicians can profit from] reality shows. Fashion. Maybe I release five or six tracks and the rest comes in a paid subscription, that is basically a fan club…. Most labels are going to become management companies [making money from booking concerts, etc. rather than selling CDs.] There will be a lot of pain.
In fact, he is right. Similarly, the book publishing was not really revitalized thanks to Amazon, if anything, Amazon exposed the real challenges with book publishing even though the Web probably has done more than any other variable to get people to read more and have letters, words and phrases closer to them than ever before.
Today, we ask if Jeff Bezos will change that by taking books into the digital age, once and for all.
Read on.
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