The Bookseller.com

4th July 2009

Kieron Smith is managing director of The Book Depository.

Amazon's $300m download

04.02.08

The purchase by Amazon of Audible should pose quite a serious question for both publishers and booksellers who want to sell audio books as digital downloads. As an industry we ought to feel very uncomfortable that one retailer will have virtual monopoly.

But the industry, in the most part, would rather ignore the whole problem and just be glad that someone is dealing with the files so it doesn't have to.

Tackling digital downloads raises questions for publishers on delivery, storage and marketing, and the question (yet again) if they can go direct to customer and cut everyone else out.

Wholesalers are in a unenviable position of having to look like they are digital distribution experts because they distribute physical copies of titles (and need to look like they're keeping up) but actually have few booksellers willing to integrate downloads into their online offer, and I suspect even fewer publishers banging on the door with the content.

Booksellers haven't exactly been at the forefront of pushing the digital download market – and yes I still strongly believe that a physical book is best, but in significant niches, such as audio there is clearly a market.

The niche is hard to measure because of Audible's dominance and iTunes' near monopoly of distribution. Just to have these downloads mixed in with the rest of the book catalogue isn't a solution to selling these titles, like any good book sale they need to be targeted at the right customer at the right time, and with the somewhat generic sites out there in book e-commerce at the moment this just isn't happening.

Admittedly Amazon's ambitions to include (and wrap up) digital downloads in its standard checkout screen and the launch of Kindle smack slightly of its existing large market share forcing it to look outside of standard formats, however the lack of APIs for the industry just to sell these titles is soon likely to be a barrier to growth for everyone.

Publishers should take this opportunity to look at delivery mechanisms outside of Audible and question DRM's appropriateness to these titles. If the music industry can move from DRM which seems increasingly likely – why can't audio titles which face far less of a potential pirating issue.

With Amazon leading the way in integrating downloads through its checkout and iTunes using only Audible for audio titles, we urgently need some diversification, both in this specific case and in online bookselling in general.

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