Oyster is launching an e-book store

Oyster is launching an e-book store
wired.com

After doing some research, here’s the part that the Wired article doesn’t make explicit:

Yes, the Oyster subscription service is has titles from "all 5 big publishers" and yes, it is "unlimited" but the catch is that the content is mostly the publishers’ back catalogs. In other words, a brand new book release would not have been available on the $9.95 subscription service on the first day. This is similar to Amazon Prime Instant Video where the old seasons of TV shows are free but the latest/last/current season costs $$$. Spotify for music also works like that for some artists; Adele has her old songs available in the subscription but her brand new song might only be available from iTunes for $1.29.

It looks like a common industry pattern of segmentation whether it's books, videos, or songs: the old stuff can be packaged into cheap subscriptions but the new stuff will command a separate premium.

With Oyster adding the ebook retail component, members can get access to the very latest books without waiting months (or years) for the title to show up as a subscription option. The members simply buy the ebook as a separate additional charge from the $9.95 subscription.

Since Jeff Bezos’ seems to have a very antagonistic relationship with the book publishers, it gives Oyster a chance for significant ebook sales.

What’s odd is that Jeff Bezos studied Walmart and he surely knows that the brick&morter stores share analytics sales data with their vendors. That way, the vendors can maximize efficiency of their supply chains and in turn, offer lower prices to Walmart. The article implies that amazon.com does not share analytics with the publishers (unlike Oyster) . I don’t know why Bezos would be so guarded about it since it can help publishers fine tune their offerings which in turn should help Jeff sell more ebooks and Kindle devices. Maybe he thinks he needs that proprietary data as a comparative advantage for his own publishing house[1]. However, it seems unrealistic to think many major authors would jump to Amazon Publishing because amazon has better analytics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Publishing