Amazon

Here's a new Amazon Sales Rank tracking website you might like to check out, along the lines of Titlez though aiming to be more friendly to the end user with more features and usability: NovelRank:

NovelRank is a completely free website for authors to track their Amazon Sales Rank on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk (United Kingdom), Amazon.ca (Canada), Amazon.fr (France), Amazon.de (Germany), and Amazon.co.jp (Japan). NovelRank is the best free resource for self-promoting authors to track their book's sales and Sales Rank on Amazon with charting, RSS feeds, and real-time data.

The creator of the site told me that it's still a work in progress - currently you track each book by going to its individual page referred to by Amazon ASIN - for example, http://www.novelrank.com/asin/0980711126. But in future "accounts will be enabled so that users can have a single page to track the status of multiple books as well as chart those books together" (and OpenID will be used so that you can use your current Google, Yahoo etc account). Well worth supporting with a donation, as it will certainly be a handy tool for self-publishers (and a good complement to Aaron Shepard's excellent Sales Rank Express).

From the mouth of Bezos:

I get grumpy now when I have to read a physical book....The physical book has had a great 500 year run, but it's time to change

More thoughts from Amazon's founder and CEO here.

Time Magazine has a new feature available online titled "Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business?".:

No question, Amazon is the most forward-thinking company in the book business. If there's a Steve Jobs of books, it's Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos. His vision is defining the way books will be bought and sold and written and read in the digital world — which is to say, the world. The question is whether there will be room in it for anyone besides Amazon.

Ultimately, the article says the free market will not allow Amazon to completely dominate. Apart from a brief mention though, it doesn't explore the possible monopolistic advantages of Amazon's vertical integration and whether that may be a significant buttress against the wants and needs of the free market.

Self-publishing guru Morris Rosenthal takes a look at the latest book sales figures on his website, which seem to suggest that Amazon has won the war for supremacy in the book-selling market. After plateaus in sales in recent years, its competitors now seem to be in decline. Will we see changes of strategy from Amazon in coming years, now that its dominance looks complete?

Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American Publishers has speculated that Amazon and Google could combine to dominate the online book market (even more than they already do?), in the wake of the Google Book Search legal settlement:

Speaking at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, Sarnoff noted that Amazon currently dominates the market for downloadable e-books. He said that the settlement "forces Google to become a provider of electronic books with a different business model" in direct competition with Amazon. And he said that some aspects of the massive settlement would be "difficult to replicate" for Google's competitors.

There's some interesting discussion in there about how the Google settlement will dictate the way Google provides books to end users as well.

Aaron Shepard has unveiled the 'next generation' version of his excellent publishing tool Sales Rank Express, which provides a summary of information from Amazon for publishers on ten of their books (at a time):

It's now several times as powerful, with a lot more information presented, and a lot more convenience in looking for it. You can search by author, publisher, title words, ISBN (10-digit or 13-digit), or any combination of the four. Within the results, you can then automatically look up the same info for all formats of a title (paperback, hardcover, etc.), or for the book’s top ten pairings (the competing and complementary titles used for Also Bought lists, exit offers, etc.).

The new version provides information on sales rank, customer rating, Amazon discount, copies in stock and top pairings, plus lots more. Full details are available on Aaron's blog.