Amazon used to be able to sell the Kindle based on its readability in sunlight. That’s a fair comparison to make and the old advertising featured little more than people being happy reading. To wit: → Read More
According to GoodEReader, Amazon is planning to open a retail store in Seattle this year where they will sell Amazon-exclusive books and, more importantly, Kindles of all kinds. While this looks to be more of a pop-up retail presence than a fully-fledged store, if I were in publishing I’d be circling the wagons right now.
To be fair, Amazon’s own publishing offerings are pretty wonky so far. There haven’t been many runaway successes coming out of the house although Clay Shirkey and Tim Ferris will soon be bringing their own brand of publishing success and there are some interesting cross-cultural titles coming out. But that’s not why publishing has to worry.
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When Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld in 1998, he did something unusual. For the first time in any presentation he had ever given, he ended with a slide reading, “Oh, and one more thing…” This phrase would of course enter the Apple lexicon in the subsequent years. But what was it that was hidden behind this first “one more thing”?
“Think Profit.”
You see, Jobs had just been named interim CEO in September 1997 after successfully pushing out the man who brought him (back) in, Gil Amelio. And he had good reason to do that: under Amelio, Apple had lost $1.04 billion in the prior year and was less than ninety days from being completely broke. Just a few months later, as he announced on stage, Jobs had the company back in black: a $45 million profit — the first profit the company had seen in more than two years.
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Amazon has just released fourth quarter 2011 earnings, missing sales expectations but beating earnings estimates. Net income decreased 58% to $177 million in the fourth quarter, or $0.38 per diluted share, compared with net income of $416 million, or $0.91 per diluted share, in fourth quarter 2010. Net sales increased 35% to $17.43 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $12.95 billion in fourth quarter 2010. Analysts are expecting earnings of $0.17 cents a share on revenue of about $18.3 billion.
“We are grateful to the millions of customers who purchased the Kindle Fire and Kindle e-reader devices this holiday season, making Kindle our bestselling product across both the U.S. and Europe,” said Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos. “Our millions of third-party sellers had a tremendous holiday season with 65% unit growth and now represent 36% of total units sold.” → Read More
For people who have been doing just one thing for a long, long time, it’s amazing how many content distributors get things so catastrophically wrong.
These last few weeks brought us quite a few unique situations, including the launch of Apple’s iBook Author software as well as a number of announcements from the studios to withhold streaming rights for Netflix viewers. Cory Doctorow points to a particularly delightful bit of DRM making the rounds in publishing right now, something that will be familiar iTunes users who found their real names embedded in music files a while back. → Read More
Personal recommendations have always been a part of ecommerce, but there has been little innovation since Amazon introduced retail and product personalization 10 years ago. But with the increasing mountains of data at digital retailers’ fingertips, ecommerce is about to get even more personal.
The fact is that right now there is little iteration from personalized ecommerce beyond what is taking place on Amazon. So you’ll see suggestions of what other shoppers who bought a certain item also purchased, or recommendations to similar items to what you have purchased, but there is a whole world of social data, and even more-in-depth purchase data that can be mined by retailers to help increase sales. → Read More
Wuh oh, Samsung — better watch your tail. While Apple might not be seeing any impact (be it positive or negative) on iPad sales from the launch of the Kindle Fire, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab ought to be feeling the heat.
Tapping into the data provided by their app analytics platform (which they estimate has found its way onto around 90% of the Android devices out there), Flurry highlights a few surprising numbers. → Read More
Apple’s iPad reigns supreme from whatever angle you choose to look at the tablet market (profits, apps, quality, market share, mindshare, you name it), but research firm Strategy Analytics this morning said Android did manage to capture a record 39 percent tablet OS market share in the fourth quarter of 2011.
Apple maintains the lead with 58 percent market share in Q4 2011 (down from 68 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010).
Peter King, a research director at Strategy Analytics, says global tablet shipments (the research firm explains that these refer to ‘sell-in’ and not over-the-counter sales) reached an all-time high of 26.8 million units in Q4 2011, surging 150 percent from 10.7 million in Q4 2010. → Read More
While we’re on the subject of publishing, Sarah Lacy found a great monologue on the current state of publishing and how, in short, Amazon is tearing old publishing houses a new one.
Publishers, like music producers, don’t make money piddling around with 50 mid-list books. They make money buying (for millions) and selling (a few) books by human black holes like Snooki and the Kardashians. They make money selling Stephen King novels and Newt Gingrich screeds. They make money, to mix industries, by betting on big budget dramas and reality TV. Sometimes a gem sneaks through, but it’s rare. → Read More
Amazon is releasing new data on its Kindle Lending Library, which the e-commerce site says now has over 75,000 books. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a collection of books that Amazon Prime members who own a kindle can borrow once a month, with no due dates.
Amazon recently launched KDP Select, a fund that lets indie authors and publishers make money off of lending. Basically, if a KDP author or publisher chooses to make any of their books exclusive to the Kindle Store for at least 90 days, those books are eligible to be included in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and can earn a share of the KDP Select fund. → Read More
Customer experience analytics company ForeSee recently released data on which e-commerce companies had the most customer satisfaction in 2011. Amazon and Amazon proved to be among the winners, with Netflix falling last year in terms of sentiment. Foresee has done a similar study on satisfaction for retailer mobile commerce sites, and it looks like once again Apple and Amazon are head and shoulders above the competition in terms of customer satisfaction for mobile commerce, via both apps and the mobile web.
As we’ve noticed over the past year, mobile commerce has taken off and continues to grow exponentially as more and more consumers use their smartphones for research, shopping decisions and purchases. Because of this trend, ForeSee compiled data from consumers to produce statistically reliable mobile satisfaction scores for 16 of the largest e-retailers in the United States. Apple and Amazon, which scored 85 and 84, respectively, on the study’s 100-point scale, topped the list by a wide margin. → Read More
Netflix has made its debut in the UK and Ireland in early 2012, just like they promised, having worked out video content licensing deals with the likes of BBC Worldwide and MGM.
Users in the UK and Ireland can now subscribe to Netflix to watch available content on their connected TVs, computers, tablets, game consoles and mobile devices. In the UK, Netflix will be bumping heads with Amazon-owned LOVEFiLM, the well-established movie and TV series streaming service. Read more at TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
The rights to Casa.com (Spanish for ‘house’) have been transferred to Amazon, indicating the ecommerce giant’s next dedicated vertical shop may be a home decor site. Amazon’s Quidsi network of sites already runs diapers.com for baby goods, wag.com for pets, beautybar.com for — well, you get it. If you visit Casa.com now you’ll find more evidence, with a blank screen explaining “You have reached an invalid location. Maybe you are looking for http://www.diapers.com, http://www.soap.com…” Casa.com could offer a more affordable, traditional home decor shopping alternative to luxury and flash sales sites like One Kings Lane and Gilt’s Decorati. → Read More
In November, Mobile ad network Millennial Media reported that Amazon’s new tablet devices Kindle Fire, was seeing ad impressions grow at an average daily rate of 19% since its launch to the public in the middle of the month. Millennial says it’s not just seeing millions of impressions and the device is on a monthly run rate of hundreds of millions of impressions. But that data was gathered from a few weeks of usage from consumers in November, and as Amazon reported yesterday, December’s holiday season brought record sales for the Kindle Fire, with over 4 million Kindle devices sold in December. The Kindle Fire was the most gifted and wished for product on Amazon this season.
Today, Millennial is releasing data from its ad network showing impressive growth numbers from the Kindle Fire over the holiday weekend. In November, impressions on the Kindle Fire grew an average rate of 19 percent every day. Over this past weekend, Millennial says that as consumers opened and used their new Kindle Fires, ad impressions increased even more. As millions of consumers unwrapped new Kindle Fires, Millennial saw an average daily growth rate of 113 percent. → Read More
M-Edge, a small Maryland-based company responsible for many popular Kindle cases, last week filed suit against Amazon. According to the Wall Street Journal, M-Edge claims that Amazon has repeatedly tried to change the terms of a contract put into place all the way back in 2009, and has bullied the accessory maker each time it fights back.
In the original contract, Amazon was to receive a 15 percent commission on all sales that go through Amazon’s Kindle store front. Apparently this wasn’t enough for Amazon, who later requested an increase in commission to 32 percent and threatened to remove M-Edge cases from the store if the Maryland-based company didn’t concede. → Read More
You wanted an Android tablet for Christmas… and you got one! Alas, it’s a Kindle Fire. Whoops! While the Fire is technically well within the realm of “Android tablet” (and a mighty fine tablet, for the price), it’s not quite the tried-and-true vanilla Android experience you were looking for.
Wait! Don’t go requesting that return label just yet: if a gang of goodhearted hackers have their way, Amazon’s wonderfully wallet-friendly tablet will be running the latest builds of straight-up Android (as in Ice Cream Sandwich) before too long. In fact, they’ve (sort of) already got it working. → Read More
As online retail sales continue to soar, brick and mortar stores are seeing margins dissipate. Online holiday sales are expected to grow 15 percent to $37.6 billion this season while retail sales in physical stores are only expected to increase by 3.8 percent to $469.1 billion. Best Buy recently reported a 29 percent drop in profits because of discounts and sales of top grossing electronics. The fact is that the electronics retailer was probably forced into offering deeply discounted deals in order to compete with e-commerce giant Amazon. And it doesn’t help that Amazon is now offering discounts to consumers on any product purchased via its price comparison mobile app, another huge blow to physical retailers.
Brick and mortar retailers need to figure out a way to compete with Amazon and other e-commerce giants that doesn’t eat into margins. Deals and coupons simply aren’t enought. And as former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson has said, retail isn’t broken, stores are. So how are retail stores going to survive? While mobile may be the technology e-commerce companies are using to jab physical stores, it is also the technology that may save these stores. Personalization and data are the two key factors that could save retail stores; and the vehicle by which these technologies can be utilized is via the mobile phone.
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Amazon is making it easier for its users to discover recommended content today with the launch of a new ‘best of’ digital store, where consumers can find recommendations from Amazon’s team of editors on the year’s best of movies & TV shows, music, video games, software, mobile apps, magazines and Kindle books and more. Basically, Amazon will recommend the best of any type of digital content that the company sells.
Of course, the timing of the launch is meant to coincide with holiday shopping season, which has historically brought record sales of digital content for Amazon. Last year, from Christmas Eve through December 30, Amazon customers purchased over three times more digital content, including Kindle books, magazines, movies, TV shows, music, and digital games as compared to the weekly average for the year.
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Online retail giant Amazon this morning announced that it will open four new distribution centers, two in Virginia and two in Tennessee, and that it will invest a total of $270 million to get the new facilities completed by next fall – just in time for next year’s holiday season.
In Virginia, Amazon says it will create about 1,350 jobs, while the new distribution centers in Tennessee will create 1,300 jobs. Amazon operates such facilities, which it calls fulfillment centers, to warehouse and ship items customers have ordered on Amazon.com. → Read More
Amazon has stopped pretending that a group of e-reading apps it allowed onto its Android Appstore weren’t available on the Kindle Fire. For whatever reason, the company was effectively hiding e-reading apps from companies like Wattpad, Kobo and Bluefire, even though they worked perfectly fine on the low-cost tablet computer.
Confused about why its app didn’t appear for users on the Kindle Fire, which is proving to be quite a sought-after device, Wattpad engaged in conversations with some folks over at Amazon, which apparently led to a necessary change in policy for all makers of mobile e-reading apps.
It’s unclear when Amazon started showing e-reading apps from rivals (including Wattpad’s) on Kindle Fire, exactly, but it seems they started appearing in listings sometime yesterday afternoon. Possibly, this was part of the Kindle Fire update that was delivered earlier this week. → Read More
