Was treibt Amazon an? Wie verändert der Online-Händler den Buchmarkt? Und welche Auswirkungen hat all das auf Autoren? Wer Antworten auf diese Fragen sucht, sollte dieses Interview anhören/lesen, das Amazon-Chef Jeff Bezos dem Business Insider gegeben hat.
Darin beschreibt er seine Mission für die Amazon-/Kindle-Lesewelt und versucht zu erklären, warum er glaubt, dass die digitale Welt mehr Verbesserungen als Verschlechterungen für die Buchwelt bringen wird:
What we really have to do, if we want a healthy culture of long-form reading, is to make books more accessible.Part of that is making them less expensive. Books, in my view, are too expensive. Thirty dollars for a book is too expensive. If I’m only competing against other $30 books, then you don’t get there. If you realize that you’re really competing against Candy Crush and everything else, then you start to say, “Gosh, maybe we should really work on reducing friction on long-form reading.“ That’s what Kindle has been about from the very beginning.
In the internet era, almost all of the tools for reading have been reducing the friction of short-form reading. The internet is perfect for delivering three paragraphs to your smartphone. The Kindle is trying to reduce friction for reading a whole book. It’s working. The vision for Kindle is every book, every imprint, in any language, all available in 60 seconds. That’s a multi-decade vision. We’ve been working on it for a decade now, and we’ve made huge progress. We’re making books easier to get, more affordable, more accessible. It’s a fantastic mission.
