Which industry is Amazon going to gobble up first in India?
E-commerce?
Not quite. There is fight left in Flipkart yet, especially with Walmart in the game.
The industry that is a sitting duck for Amazon is the publishing industry! It always has been.
Ladies and Gentlemen, join your hands together in welcoming Chetan Bhagat to Amazon Publishing.
Love him or hate him, every writer wants to be Chetan Bhagat. A bestseller. A record-breaking bestseller. So, where Chetan Bhagat is going, the rest will go too!
Nobody in India knows how to market books, really. Publishers don’t have much of a brand themselves. As much as my literary friends would like to squeamishly object to that statement by saying, “Of course, publishers have a brand. There is prestige in getting published by so and so,” readers buy the authors, not the publishers.
A successful author may be the cash cow a publishing house uses to publish many others. But they can’t replicate the success. Each author has to have her own luck in that department.
So, coming back to the point, nobody knows how to market books. The author has to have a brand. Once the author has a brand, pricing and distribution are all that really matter.
Amazon is the price-reduction king of the world. Everybody’s margin is their opportunity.
With Flipkart and everybody else having given up on the books category, Amazon is the only online distribution channel that matters. As long as offline distribution remains significant, they can rely on their earlier acquisition Westland. Not to forget, most big offline distributors are also sellers on Amazon – much under the giant’s debt and influence!
Although Amazon’s takeover of trade publishing is likely to generate more oohs and aahs, the real (and perhaps silent) bloodbath will begin once they enter the educational and textbook segment as trade publishing is a relatively small part of Indian publishing industry. The real money is in textbooks. And make no mistake, Amazon is coming for that too.
Amazon seems to have an almost ideological commitment to the books category. Nobody else has really cracked it. In eBooks Kobo and Nook lag far behind Kindle. Apple and Google just don’t have that kind of commitment to the category. Amazon has brought it ideological commitment to India too. Even though the Indian publishing industry is not considered an exciting or particularly lucrative place to be in, Amazon is going steady. Kindle is marketed heavily. It also supports Indian languages now.
An ideological commitment almost sounds like a good thing, except that it doesn’t make them nice. They are the most ruthless company of our times. So here is the ‘stark’ pronouncement for the Indian publishing industry.
Amazon. Is. Coming.
Scratch that. Amazon has come!
Will someone at Flipkart or Walmart wake up to the books category?