Amazon Shifting Portal Positioning with Planned Book Searches
Non-Fiction books are about to get a shot in the arm from ecommerce portal provider Amazon as they negotiate providing an online search capability for thousands of titles, according to the New York Times. Release of the capability is expected in the fall pending completion of negotiations with major publishers. Amazon is not going to get hold of some key items that are hard to sample without giving away the whole item, such as cookbooks and poetry, and total searching of an item will be limited. It's no trivial task, apparently, as many desirable books are not available from publishers in electronic format, which will require scanning and such just to get them searchable. The Times plays this up as Amazon trying to position itself against providers such as Yahoo! and Google with more digestible and desirable content, but it has less to do with Amazon's market positioning than with the positioning of book publishers who continue to falter in the face of online search engines superceding bookstores and libaries of all kinds as the "go to" place for authoritative content. If publishers can embrace the eBooks concept aggressively and start learning how to market different slices of book content online, perhaps they will be able to reconceive the book format in a manner that is best adapted to audiences that are increasingly dismissive of poorly packaged and targeted content.