Brown Book Loft Blog

Online retail giant, Amazon, was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos and the original Amazon website launched in 1995. Today Amazon is an extremely successful business and one of the best recognised and most trusted brands on the planet. It’s easy to forget what an unusual concept ordering books online and having them shipped by mail was at the time. There were plenty investors and business analysts who predicted that Amazon would have a difficult time of it – and indeed it took until the end of 2001 before Amazon were able to report their first profit.

After modifying the way that many people bought books, Amazon quickly diversified into other areas. Video, music CDs, toys, consumer electronics and computer software are just some examples of the types of items which Amazon added to their list of product offerings. At the moment you can find virtually any consumer product that you can imagine on Amazon’s website – even your groceries if you like.

In addition to growing their product range, Amazon set up further websites in the UK, France, Germany, China and Canada. Nevertheless, they maintained their original passion for books and they still had, in the eyes of the public, a very strong link with book sales.

This strong link with books would serve them well in November 2007 when they launched the original Kindle e-book reader. Having already changed the method of buying books, Amazon was now altering the way that the books were read. The Kindle attracted a great deal of publicity and it’s reasonable to suggest that the e-book reader market took off exponentially when Amazon released their updated and enhanced Kindle 2.0 in February of 2009.

The large display Kindle DX reader was launched in June of the same year. This incorporated a large (9.7″) e-ink display and was intended to appeal to readers of newspapers, magazines and academic textbooks. A great deal of the excitement generated by the release of the DX originated from the normally very traditional world of academic publishing.

So, the manner in which books are bought, delivered and read have all been radically modified in a relatively short time frame. The last piece of the reading jigsaw – publishing – is also likely to change in the near future. Any major publisher will almost certainly require to publish an e-book version of any new editions in future. The well established process of hardback publication, followed a few months later by the paperback version will be altered by the insertion of an e-book version at the front end of the cycle.

Given that publishing e-books is considerably less expensive than a traditional print run, it’s possible that publishing houses may be encouraged to take a chance on less well established authors in future. It may be that more authors will decide to cut out publishers altogether and go down the self publishing route. In fact, publishing books for the Amazon Kindle is very simple and can be done for free by anyone who has an Amazon account and is able to use Microsoft Word.

Check out the Amazon Kindle and see the full range of Kindle accessories available to help you customise and protect your Kindle.