FT media editor Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson reports from the Wired design conference in New York:
Amazon lined up with those arguing that Google needs to be reined in earlier this week, as Jeff Bezos argued that the search juggernaut’s settlement with publishers should not simply be waved through by the authorities.
“We have strong opinions about that issue which I’m not going to share,” he said, before going on to share at least some of them. “Clearly that settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited and [in reference to the DoJ's recent requests for information] is being revisited.”
Bezos’s gripe is that it “doesn’t seem right you should kind of get a prize for violating all those copyrights.” Words that publishers would welcome, you might think. But Bezos clearly has a vested interest, and those US publishers that signed the settlement and subsequently encouraged Google’s efforts to help them sell ebooks direct to consumers did so in part to create a counterweight to Amazon’s digital dominance.
Some senior publishers were particularly unimpressed by one quip by the man behind the Kindle, suggesting that it was time for Gutenberg’s invention to yield to electronic readers. The book “has had a 500-year run,” Bezos said. “It’s been an unbelievably successful technology, but it’s time to change.”
With ebooks unlikely to account for more than 2-3 per cent of their revenues this year, publishers already bristling at Bezos’s insistence that a $9.99 fixed price for Kindle texts is “enough” didn’t find the joke very funny.
“Anything commercially sensible I can do to help [Barnes & Noble CEO] Steve Riggio’s rival e-reader succeed, I will,” one publisher told the FT.
