Amazon's data capture changed industry like never before, FutureBook told

Amazon has changed the publishing ecosystem more than anything else due to its “proprietary” capturing of data, FutureBook delegates have been told. 

Attendees of The Bookseller's 2021 FutureBook conference on 19th November were told how the industry had changed since the rise of e-books and Amazon’s increasing control of the market. 

Michael Tamblyn, c.e.o. of Rakuten Kobo (pictured), gave a virtual introductory address and the session was chaired by Michael Bhaskar, publisher, writer and co-founder of Canelo. Chiki Sarkar, founder and publisher of Juggernaut Books, appeared by video link from India while John B Thompson, emeritus professor of sociology at University of Cambridge, also addressed the conference virtually. Emilie Marneur, digital and business development director at Bonnier Books UK, attended the conference in person with Bhaskar at 155 Bishopsgate in London. 

Many panelists emphasised the importance of data and how Amazon had pioneered this in publishing. Thompson said: “Never before in the 500 years of book publishing has there been a retailer with this market share and with this market share comes power... it’s not just that Amazon has unprecedented power but the nature of its power if fundamentally different — not just market share but propriety control of a huge amount of what I call information capital — that is data on the purchasing practices and preferences of millions of customers. No other organisation comes anywhere near to the quantity of information capital that Amazon has. It's hard to overstate the significance of this.”

He added: “If there is one thing that has changed the ecosystem of publishing more than anything else then it's Amazon.” 

Tamblyn described the lockdown conditions as “a surprise stress test on retail”, adding: “It turns out if you lock everyone in their homes they have time for all kinds of things including reading. Available time goes up, reading goes up, sales go up. It was one of the many forced experiments that we conducted over the course of last year and we’re only about half-way through. Will that sustain? Hard to tell." 

The pandemic also forced companies to adapt quickly to encompass more of the virtual world, which he believes helped publishing's progress. “We learned that we could move fast,” he said. “It helped us find a lot of people who would go on to become e-book purchasers mostly because we were able to move fast and claim space in people’s newly found free time for reading.”  

Tamblyn added that the industry is becoming "less blindingly white, less uniformly straight and less depressingly male", which he believes was helped by changes in lockdown and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. "In a way the challenge that was thrown down by Black Lives Matter that had been building for so long before from so many different directions came at a perfect time because it was the one time it was impossible to say that change was too difficult."

Meanwhile Marneur backed up Penguin Random House c.e.o. Markus Dohle’s comments from the earlier session about the current dynamism of the sector. “Markus talked a bit about this, about how vibrant the landscape is at the moment but I profoundly feel this competition is super healthy, it keeps us on our toes and forces us to be better at what we do and empowers authors,” she said. 

Marneur believes that a lot of this is due to Amazon and its “author-centred” approach as a publisher after previously working at the e-retailer. She believes the company has encouraged the industry overall to progress. “It forces you to make changes, some of this is uncomfortable, some of them are really complex and hard to put in place. When I look back at Amazon Publishing, that author-centricity as a driving force has contributed to big changes, not just in the company but in the industry itself.  To a very large extent it has led to digital royalties. If you look at digital-only publishers, the digital royalties are significantly higher, spearheaded by Amazon Publishing.” 

The increasing popularity of the “all-you-can-eat" style subscription models was also discussed in the session. Tamblyn said: “In the last two years, the world also got used to streaming and subscription services for everything. Mass consumption of film, TV and music is an all-you-can-eat monthly model. Kobo just launched four new subscriptions of all you can read in Australia, New Zealand and Italy in the last two weeks joining existing services in Netherlands, Canada and Portugal.” 

Sarkar, who created an app for her publishing company, explained that many customers were put off by the unlimited models increasingly offered by companies, saying: “How do you redefine yourself without pissing off and upsetting all the players you’ve worked with? There is also a problem around pricing and subscriptions.” 

She believes that many customers felt they did not get value for money from the all-you-can-read subscriptions. “One of the things we found was that India is very price-conscious so when we gave an option of unlimited we found they were hesitant... we changed our subscription model to two books a month, four books a month and unlimited and most people bought the two books a month option.”