Larry Kirshbaum
As I’ve written in the post of “Distribution Rise While Contents Fall Behind”, many aggregating platfrom players are more focused compared to contents providers. Hulu, netflix and spotify have their own power to handle the online channel. And so does Amazon.
But it’s time to get good quality contents. There is a very interesting article that deals with various issues around a publisher and a content provider (Amazon’s Hit Man of Bloomberg Businessweek). As the competition between aggregators gets fierce, contents are still a key to defeat others.
Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether he loses money on books for the larger cause of stocking the Kindle with exclusive content unavailable in Barnes & Noble’s Nook or Apple’s iBookstores.
But it doesn’t mean that the contents providers are getting more power. As Kirshbaum points out, publishing is not easy to make its sustainable growth. Even though contents are still sources for making various types of business models, contents providers are limited in connecting their assets to customers. A traditional publishing business is doomed to the end. And in the case of some players such as Amazon, distribution platform providers try to get their own strategic sources to differentiate their services.
Kirshbaum acknowledges some friction with his former cohorts but downplays it, pointing to the industry’s similarly fearful reaction to Barnes & Noble’s 2003 acquisition of the publisher Sterling for $115 million. Publishers thought their world was coming to end then, too.
And there is a very intriguing point that doesn’t have any relation with the issue of e-book publishing. It is about the right time to establish a business. As you can see from the paragraph of the article, e-book is not a first trial of Amazon. But Kindle makes it a feasible business opportunity. And in the case of other mobile games and etc., a smartphone is a basic infrastructure for more advanced mobile services.
In CES, there are several wearable computing devices. And NIKE plus and other health machines have been already introduced publicly several times. If they have more competition which differentiates them from its traditional substitutes, those devices may appeal to users like a Kindle.
Kirshbaum was also an early backer of electronic books. In 1995 he formed a group called Time Warner Electronic Publishing and started putting books on floppy disks. A few years later he gotTime Warner (TWX) to invest more than $10 million to develop digital titles for an early e-reading device called the Rocketbook. That didn’t work either. “The world just wasn’t ready for it,” Kirshbaum says. “We didn’t have the Kindle.”