Amazon’s Growing Share of the Institutional Market - Joseph J. Esposito at Digital Book World 2014

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Amazon’s Growing Share of the Institutional Market Joseph J. Esposito has had a long career in publishing as a top executive (Simon & Schuster, Random House, and as CEO at Encyclopedia Britannica) and, for the past two decades, as a consultant with many clients in scholarly and academic publishing. Esposito has found that many libraries are using Amazon as a principal source for book acquisitions, even though most publishers are not really aware of their active role in this marketplace. Esposito will make the case that Amazon is an important player in this market, not just with the consumer customer base that is seen as their greatest strength.

Education Technology

Amazon’s Black Hole for Data
Joseph J. Esposito
Digital 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 onehalf 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
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•

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

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