Go, Read: Milton Griepp Visits The Amazon Store

I enjoyed this article by Milton Griepp at his ICv2.com hobby business and news analysis site. Griepp visits the new Amazon.com store and reverse-engineers a few publishing strategies that appear to be in use, at least to his veteran eyes. The idea that for instance you need carry nothing but the first and last issues of a series with everything else coming from the retailer's on-line services is really interesting -- you're hitting samplers, and latest-volume fans, and that's it. The use of Amazon.com rating factor in deciding what makes the store seems more problematic to me as those ratings can be politicized; they must be comfortable with the results they're getting, but I know authors and publishes complain about them. A third strategy, a price strategy that accesses on-line pricing to find the latest price, is something we'll likely see in more stores soon."

The interesting thing about the set-up as Griepp describes it is that it constitutes a completely different emphasis in who a bookstore -- and be definition a comics store -- is trying to reach, mostly by limiting it to a certain kind of customer. The bad thing is that the comics and book stores that might be in the area of such a store run at margins that just the overlap could be hugely damaging to a vital bookstore's bottom line. I guess we'll see -- they are hardy creatures, indie bookstores and comics shops. It kind of reminds me of a criticism you used to see in comics that DC and Marvel would leverage their financial position to crowd out other publishers by putting into effect that they're shielded form having to be profitable in-and-of-themselves. In fact, Amazon is kind of the king of the argument that you don't have to profitable in any aspect of your business to be successful and have an impact on other businesses.

No matter if your expectation is on the scale from benign to dire, it's nice to read Milton's take, and I look forward to see how/if that part of the book business develops.
 
posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink
 

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