The future of the book industry, digital or physical? : Case study: Amazon
Vrethager, Robin (2017)
Vrethager, Robin
Metropolia Ammattikorkeakoulu
2017
All rights reserved
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2017112618213
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2017112618213
Tiivistelmä
Gutenberg’s letterpress was once a revolutionary tool for the book industry. Mankind could now produce books in bigger scales and distribute in a greater amount than before. However, since then there has been little development inside of the book industry, until recently. The digital revolution of the internet changed big parts of the entertainment industry. The music and film industry first fell to their knees because of the downloading piracy and later on the online streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix. The book industries stakeholders held their breaths. New digital gadgets emerged and suddenly the E-Reader had found its way into the global market. Along with the internet came new ways of distributing books, both physical and EBooks. New actors such as Amazon that had also emerged from the early internet years era saw their big opportunity for an increasing online demand for digital and physical commodities. As the price for an EBook was set quite high in the beginning several stakeholders inside of the business had big problems with investing in the new digital format. However, Amazon changed all that by implementing a loss leader model where prices were heavily reduced to attract customers to their webstore. With the increasing sales of EBooks for Amazon, the six biggest publishers around the world signed an exclusive deal with Apple to increase the competition. The publishers tried to extort Amazon by saying that if they did not accept the same agreement as Apple they would not be allowed to sell their books anymore. Amazon backed off and agreed with some of the publishers. The American Department of Justice decided to charge Apple and the publishers and one by one they backed off the agreement with Apple. Apple lost their appeal and had to reimburse their customers for too high retailing prices. However, around 2012 the sales of E-readers peaked and since has declined as the EBooks. There has been a revival for the physical copy of the book and therefore retailers such as Amazon has decided invest also in physical stores across Northern America.