Jeff Bennett's Blog

The book market is pretty traditional and staid, though there are many innovations that are occurring on the ways authors publish, books are distributed and the trading models for books.

The Kindle is one of the most revolutionary devices that is on the market and has great promise.  The promise of eBooks had been on the horizon for years, though Amazon seems to have done a very good job packaging this.  There are now a torrent of eBook readers that have been released or in the process of coming to market.  Great to see the innovation in the book publishing space.  Will one win?  How many will the market support?  Can these companies get the price down to make this a mass market opportunity?  All good questions that will be answered in the years ahead.

Text Books are expensive.  For years students dealt with this informally either creating manual sales or swaps of used books.  The college bookstores then started to enable this.  The entry of Cheg offered further innovation with Text book rentals and was followed into this segment by CourseSmart.  Today Barnes & Noble has launched their own college book rental service.  Again an innovative solution that is now drawing competition which should be good for the consumer.  It validates the strength of this innovative model as well.

Self publishing has been booming as an alternative for authors to pay to publish their work and then receive freedom to market the books whereever they want.  This market has been growing rapidly.  Yesterday one of the leaders in this emerging space, Lulu, filed to go public.  Lulu is based in Raleigh, NC but has filed to go public in the Canadian market.  This in itself is interestin, though the subject of another post.  Lulu and a host of other companies are thriving in a book publishing market that has been struggling.  Perhaps this is the way forward for more of the book publishing market.

SwapTree is leader in a surging movement that allows consumers to swap their books for other books.  SwapTree actually supports many categories, so a consumer can swap a book for another book or cds, dvds, video games.  There also exist some swap players just focused just on one category of media.  For the avid or casual reader, this allows an easy method to trade for new books that you want to read.  All you have to do is pay s small feel for shipping & hadling so it is a great money saver.  This really maximizes the reusability of these items that we all have in our homes and offices.

There are vast opportunities to modify the book market through innovative publishing, distribution and trading models.  These are just a few that are expanding rapidly right now.  Going to be interesting to see how these models evolve and others develop.  The book market is ripe for innovation.