Amazon Won't Be The Only One Selling Kindle Books Next Year (AMZN)
Scribd, the YouTube for print, is working on a new way to get e-books onto your Kindle without buying them from Amazon. — Right now, to get one of the tens of millions of Scribd documents has — books, papers …
Context & Ripple Effects
Silicon Alley Insider has been tracking the Kindle's channel dynamics since the start: back in November 2007 the site floated the fantasy that the Kindle would save newspapers, and in March 2009 Business Week asked whether Amazon's Apple deal risked turning the Kindle into a cannibal of its own content business. In between, May 2009 saw Amazon open Kindle publishing to any blog, loosening who could put material on the device.
The new wrinkle: Scribd — the document-sharing platform often called the YouTube for print, with tens of millions of documents already hosted — is confirmed to be building a delivery route that puts its e-books on Kindles without purchases flowing through Amazon. That matters because Amazon has just reported December as its best-ever sales month for the reader, meaning the installed base Scribd would tap is larger than ever.
First-order effects
- Amazon's position as the sole seller of Kindle books comes under direct threat next year: every Scribd e-book delivered around its store is a sale on which Amazon takes no cut.
- Scribd gains a distribution channel onto the fastest-growing e-reader install base without building hardware or striking a retail partnership with Amazon.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers and document platforms now have a template for bypassing Amazon's storefront on the Kindle, putting pressure on the margins Amazon charges for e-book distribution.
- Amazon's response options narrow toward deepening lock-in on its own store — bundling, exclusives, or pricing — rather than relying on default placement on its device.
Third-order effects
- If side-door delivery holds, the e-reader market follows the pattern of other hardware businesses: the device decouples from the store, and competition shifts from selling readers to whoever controls the content checkout.
- Regulators and publishers watching single-retailer concentration in e-books gain a market-driven alternative before any antitrust conversation gets serious.
The trend: E-book distribution is unbundling from hardware makers' own stores, with third-party platforms like Scribd routing content directly onto devices such as the Kindle.