04/05/06

Amazon 2.0

The usually interminally boring Publisher’s Lunch posted a highly visionary ‘blogwatch’ article – which it strikes me may not have been written by them – which I am going to post in full.

Amazon 2.0
What does Amazon want to be when it grows up? In today’s interactive, social networking, tag-and-post Web 2.0 culture, whatever you want it to be. In case you hadn’t noticed, Amazon continues to introduce a slew of new bells and whistles to their already-crowded book (and other product) pages, many of which echo other of-the-moment trends and sites from around the web.

Like the “tagging” feature of del.icio.us and countless other sites? Amazon now encourages browsers to create their own category tags for individual books.

Want to discuss individual books and authors? Amazon has Customer Discussion boards now, still officially labelled as a “beta” feature.

Like the Wikipedia? Amazon is “testing” its own customer-driven knowledge base, called ProductWikis. For now “we will not provide a way to create stand-alone topics (e.g. defining soprano) and links to such pages in the first version,” but “we may add that support in a later version.” They also explain: “Like wikipedia, we support group editing, version history, reverts, notifications on changes, and diffs. Unlike wikipedia, we will use the rich text editor for editing instead of using a hacky text decoration language.”

Like MySpace and accumulating online friends? If you post anywhere on the site, Amazon creates a Profile page for you that you can modify. Just like MySpace, you can invite others to join you as an Amazon Friend.

Like Squidoo’s “lenses” on different topics? Amazon’s So You’d Like to . . . guides “are a way for you to help other customers find all the items and information they might need for something they are interested in.”

Like podcasts? Amazon’s got a monthly one now, starting in April. The Amazon Wire includes “an exclusive audio essay from Freakonomics author Stephen J. Dubner entitled ‘Teaching Monkeys to Use Money.’”

Like Flickr? You can post your images on Amazon, too, creating your own image gallery, and/or adding pictures a “customer images” section on product pages. (I don’t see any YouTube video-sharing here yet, but it can’t be far off.)

In the vein of their existing stats and comparison, one item how details on a percentage basis “What do customers ultimately buy after viewing items like this?” And in another area entirely, Amazon’s latest test offer to Marketplace sellers (from just a few days ago) is a “fulfillment by Amazon” program. Marketplace vendors can now store their new and used inventory with Amazon and have the e-tailer handle the shipping and customer service–which also lets these products qualify for Amazon’s various discounted shipping offers, and is likely to only increase sales for these goods.

Of course the interactivity that some customers may appreciate the most is a “click to call” box that promises a customer service telephone call from a live Amazonian: “Provide your phone number and we’ll call you right away.”

Sure, it’s derivative, a bit chaotic, and times even a little silly-sounding, but you may have thought the same thing 8 years about Amazon’s customer reviews. I think there are a couple of significant points here. The company that sells exponentially more of your product on the Internet than anyone else thinks this works, and makes them more attractive to customers. Equally important is that once upon a time, furious initiatives like this cost so much you couldn’t even think about offering them yourself. In today’s world, however, you can offer comparable features and more at little or no actual cost. It’s time–or rather way past time–for publishers to look at getting out of the controlled, static web page mode and into the visitor-focused, information and interaction driven world that defines today’s Internet.

Why shouldn’t your official page about an author or book be the primary place where readers visit, post, comment, clip, link and connect? Why shouldn’t you host blogs for your authors and readers alike? Why shouldn’t you encourage MySpace and Squidoo pages and viral videos and podcasts and blog links about your authors and your books? Doing one thing (hey, we have a podcast), one time (for one of our 30,000 titles in print we have a stand-alone web site with free browsing), one way (we sent ARCs to 75 bloggers for our big March release) doesn’t count.

As we’re often reminded, the core act of a publisher is to make an author’s work public. But the channels that you used to think you controlled either don’t matter as much anymore, or are no longer subject to your control. Today’s world provides for, and practically demands, more dynamic “publication” via the Internet. As we’ve mentioned before in other more limited discussions, if you’re not the primary open-source source for readers than someone else will be–Amazon, Google, MSN, BN.com, MySpace, and so on, and whomever you allow to develop those relationships in your place will the entity holding the leveraging (and charging the fees) in the future, until at some point they really are the publishers.

Time for a policy review.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Future of the book, Podcasts, Publishing.

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