Amazon’s Black Hole for Data

Joseph J. EspositoDigital Book World 2014

The “Hawking Radiation” Project

• Metaphor from astrophysics: information that escapes from a “black hole”

• Amazon is notoriously secretive• Some of the information it releases is

misleading• The fawning media compound Amazon’s

reticence• How to find indirect ways to get data about

Amazon?

Strategies

• Work with defined subset of books (university press titles)

• Interview U. press directors• Interview wholesalers• Interview librarians (from 4-year colleges)• Blog about findings to garner comments and

additional information

Interesting Data Points

• A French-language U. press site receives one-half of sales from outside France: http://www.lcdpu.fr

• Many American press note increasing feedback from overseas readers

• All U. presses report declining sales through B&T

• All presses report sharply rising sales through Amazon for print

It appears that Amazon . . .

• . . . is quietly taking a growing share of the international market

• . . . is becoming a significant distributor to libraries

• . . . is increasingly competing with B&T and Ingram

• And all this is for print only

A Supply-chain Paradox: Case Study

• A publisher ships books to (say) B&T• A library orders a book from Amazon• Amazon orders the book from B&T• B&T drop-ships the book to the library in an

Amazon box• Librarians say they order from Amazon instead

of B&T because the service is better!!!

Speculations

• Amazon’s market share may be even larger than generally assumed

• Market share in libraries is unknown; some estimates put it at 10% or higher

• (Currently working on a grant application to research this with an extensive library survey)

• Likelihood Amazon will develop strategy to migrate this print market share to digital, perhaps through acquisition

Contact Information

• Joseph J. Esposito• espositoj@processedmedia.com• @josephjesposito• +Joseph Esposito• http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org