Amazon, Borders: A Tale of Two Futures
May 28th, 2008 | by Brad King |
Image via Wikipedia
Borders Books is back. Back online anyway.
Seven years after striking a deal with Amazon to merge a large portion of its online operations, the brick-and-mortar bookseller announced it would strike out on its own in an attempt to sell books the new-fashioned way: through a website.
I’d characterize the reaction online as lukewarm.
Some folks love the new design, but that’s a little like dating someone and telling your friends that they were really nice. Others have said rightfully noted that design isn’t really what people want in an online book retailer. They want cheaper prices and they want feedback.
I’m sure Borders will find a niche online because the name is so well known. However, there are two nagging pieces of information swimming in my head, which if I worked for Borders, would cause me some concern.
The first is a conversation I had with Mark Cuban when I was first kicking around this book idea. I’d made a bet with the editor-in-chief of my local paper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, that I could display all 100 stories they published on one page that had no scrolling, better navigation and no ads.
We fashioned a primitive 3-D interface that did just that. I sent it along to Cuban, feeling really good about myself.
His response (paraphrased): you’ve just wrapped a pile of crap with a nice crappy bow.
In other words, we hadn’t added any real value to the news proposition. We were essentially just looking for a new interface design instead of fundamentally rethinking what the business of newspaper should be.
Ouch.
Borders appears to have done just that. Of course, that doesn’t mean failure, but I wonder what the value proposition is for people who can already get a much richer service from Amazon.
Which brings me to the second bit of information floating around in my head.
Amazon is already moving beyond the order-ship-receive model with its Kindle. On the same day Borders announces it’s going to move online, Amazon dropped the price of its must-have digital reader.
Amazon isn’t content to simply ship you a book. The company is trying to own the on-demand space by silently “asking” publishers to use its service or face being booted from the Amazon.com website. The company is trying to own the digital reader space, doing deals not just with book publishers but magazine and newspaper publishers as well.
While Borders is trying to out Amazon Amazon (despite its claims), Amazon is out Appleing Apple (because CEO Steve Jobs announced earlier this year that people don’t read anymore).
With the Kindle, users can download books, magazines and newspaper for a few of course. And to make the digital reading experience better, expect to see companies such as Zinio continue to push for digital representations of the paper experience (page flipping, crisp pictures) that also come with bookmarks, note-taking, sharing and other applications.
So while Borders moves online, Amazon is moving everywhere.
