Technology has penetrated  every industry and publishing industry is no exception. The sprawling giant ‘Amazon’ has tremendously expanded its ambitions this year and is now at a verge of adding some more to its kitty. Throughout the year, Amazon was in the news for various reasons like - mergers & acquisitions - and biggest among them was the release of the Kindle Fire.

Amazon was initially known only for selling ‘stuff’ and has now spread completely into eBook business by establishing its own hardware to promote the books. Amazon started 2011 with a bang, when Amazon.com sold more Kindle books than paperback books and towards the end of the year made its presence felt by aggressively quoting a lesser price for the Kindle Fire than the iPad 2. Here are some facts:

January: Amazon launched Amazon deals, a free iPhone App that provides an overview of daily deals to the customers.

March: Amazon joined the online music streaming business with Cloud Player, a music player that allows anyone to upload the music to Amazon’s servers and stream them on the web, an Android device, iPad or a Kindle Fire.

April: Amazon launched the Android equivalent of Apple’s App Store to improve the Google’s Android market shopping experience, the go-to store to purchase Android apps with unique test drive feature. Read more: http://mashable.com/2011/03/22/amazon-appstore-android/

May: Amazon hits the runway with MyHabit.com, a membership-only shopping site that offers sales up to 60% off clothes and accessories for men, women and children. The site also offers discounts on toys, beauty and home products. It was in this month that Amazon added a new member to the Kindle family: a 6-inch Kindle 3G. Only four years old, Amazon’s Kindle eBooks outsold physical books purchased on Amazon. For every 100 print books sold, 105 Kindle eBooks were sold. Amazon launched the Mac Downloads Store, a direct competitor to Apple’s Mac App Store.

June: In another European deal, Amazon acquired The Book Depository, a UK-based online bookseller that offers more than 6 million book titles and free delivery worldwide. Read more:http://mashable.com/2011/07/04/amazon-aquisition/

September: Details about Amazon’s Android-based tablet emerged ahead of Amazon’s press event.

November: Amazon’s Kindle eReaders and tablets sold exceptionally well on Black Friday, especially the Kindle Fire, which was the bestselling product on Amazon.com that day. Read more:http://mashable.com/2011/11/28/black-friday-kindle/

December: Amazon Publishing Acquires Children’s Imprint Marshall Cavendish. Read more:http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/amazon-buys-450-marshall-cavendish-childrens-books_b43471

With the publishing industry evolving ever so dynamically, Amazon seems to be seizing the opportunity to captivate as big a market as it can through diversified strategies and plans. Now the big question here is, will the publishers and literary agents be able to withstand such a change and challenge?

With Amazon having gained the experience and power to develop, publish and distribute its own books, it will be interesting to study its relevance in the publishing circle.  Amazon has changed the landscape of the publishing industry totally by having its say in all spheres and it is clear now that we have entered a “dynamic world of publishing”.

This article was featured in the iPublishCentral Newsletter. To subscribe to our newsletters, write to us at marketing@impelsys.com

Tags: Amazon, Dynamics, ePublishing future, future of eBooks, Impelsys, ipublishcentral, online books, Publishers, publishing, Publishing Industry, Publishing landscape

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2012 and is filed under Announcements, News, Observations, Readers, Thoughts, ebooks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.