Just last Friday, I wrote about how Amazon has essentially become a book industry “in a box”, having completed the vertical integration of the book industry by launching their own imprints. And now that box has just gotten a whole lot bigger: on Sunday, the news broke that Amazon has hired former Time Warner Book Group CEO Larry Kirshbaum, who is expected to create a slew of imprints that would put Amazon into young adult, literary fiction, business and general non-fiction.
What does this mean? With Amazon opening a New York office and making a full-on assault of publishers across many of their publishing markets, it looks like the industry’s “Big Five” — the term traditionally used to refer to Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon and Schuster and Penguin — is fast becoming the Big Six.
And with book buyers rapidly going digital, the company that owns the lion’s share of the e-reader market could have a huge advantage in getting its books in front of readers (who hasn’t bought a book as a result of Amazon’s recommendation engine at some point?). Not only that, but the existing Big Five will now see books from Amazon imprints next to their own offerings in brick and mortar bookstores.
The timing of Amazon’s move is no coincidence, since the industry’s biggest confab — Book Expo America (BEA) — gets underway this week, and there’s no doubt Amazon’s new imprints and the hiring of Kirshbaum will be the talk of the show. Many will likely react negatively, as the book industry has in general shown great dislike for the boat-rocking ways of Amazon, as evidenced by its efforts to change Amazon’s pricing. And its not just publishers, as booksellers hit hard over the past decade by Amazon’s price-cutting ways have gone so far as to organize a boycott of authors who go with Amazon’s imprints.
One question that remains unanswered is how Barnes and Noble will react to Amazon’s moves. The company — which is fast-becoming a digital retailer with a brick and mortar legacy business — has long had its own imprints, but has never shown itself to be overly aggressive in that market, probably out of deference to its relationships with big publishing. But now, with Amazon fully integrating all components of the industry and B&N seeing renewed interest from its own aggressive move into digital, I have a feeling B&N will throw deference out the window and look to join Amazon in expanding the Big Five to the Big Six or Big Seven.
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