Ask HN: Should or shouldn’t Amazon.com create a publishing company?

1 points by PJNasty ↗ HN
In light of recent events, I can’t see why they don’t begin publishing. Would this make sense for Amazon? If not, what issues make it a bad move?

3 comments

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It's a long term strategy, and very much dependent on kindle market share.

It's not a move that will help the kindle in the near/mid-term future. And that's where they're focusing now.

But in the long term if the kindle becomes popular , it might be a good move.

I'm sceptical. What does Amazon know about publishing?

With the Kindle, they were already skilled at retailing and designing user interfaces.

With their cloud services, they were selling a service they had to provide for themselves anyway.

Why would an author sign to Amazon instead of an established publisher? What could Amazon do better than them?