Self-published author here below, an extract of the article "Five Digital Publishing Questions for Rick Chapman" by Rick Chapman from Digital Book world
What are you anticipating as the big change we will see in 2015?
Amazon will continue to aggressively grow out the Kindle infrastructure and build more service layers on top of it. They already control what I call the “data layer” of the business. Amazon, via its channel and Kindle infrastructure, knows far more than publishers about what their customers buy and why; knowledge is power.
The Kindle Scout program is designed to replace traditional agents with a crowdsourced model. The Goodreads acquisition enables Amazon to build a community around book reading and information sharing. Their house imprints move them into the content layer of the book creation model. Amazon also has a dominant position in ebook reselling and will of course try to increase its market share.
Will Amazon’s ebook market share grow in 2015 or will this be the year that Apple, Kobo, Google and Nook (or someone else) push them back?
Another thing I’ve learned from my years in high-tech and the software industry is that once a technology platform is established, it’s very hard to overturn it. I think Amazon’s Kindle platform is very powerful. Its reader technology and the Mobi format are ubiquitous and widely distributed. I think Kindle/Mobi is going to be the standard for years to come, and the industry should prepare to accept this and learn how to leverage this platform on their own behalf. From the buyer’s standpoint, a standard makes sense. Who wants to manage multiple copies of the same thing?
From writers’ and publishers’ standpoints, who wants to produce and maintain multiple file formats? The only company I can think of that might challenge Amazon is Apple, but after the collusion case, I don’t think it’s high on their agenda.
Related: How Many New iBooks Customers Will Apple Get from iOS8?
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