The world’s biggest bookseller, Amazon, has finally gone into the Spanish speaking world. Amazon.es launched last Wednesday 14th September in a bid to expand its empire into the Spanish speaking world. It is all there with books, DVDs, software, electronics and home appliances….but no Kindle – at least not yet anyway. In addition to Spanish, it is covering the minority languages in Spain – Catalan, Basque and Galician.
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It is reported by the Wall Street Journal that Amazon is in preliminary talks with book publishers to launch a digital book rental service, though Amazon has not yet commented on the development in public. The service to be called Amazon Prime which is expected to roll out initially in the USA, will be for an annual fee for a library of ebooks. The figure of $79 per annum has been mentioned, which would be cheaper than Netflix’s similar offering for movies.
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Waterstone’s has announced that it will launch its own e-reader to compete with Amazon’s Kindle next year. James Daunt announced the move on BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours. The rise of ebooks, and the selling of physical books online, has given bricks-and-mortar bookshops the same problems that iTunes gave high street CD-sellers. The bookselling business is undergoing dramatic restructuring. Borders has gone. Books etc has gone. Inevitably Waterstone’s is struggling to keep up with Amazon.
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If you are fed up of not being home for that really important postal delivery that you are expecting, then Amazon may be about to offer you exactly what you want: the chance to collect your goods on the way home from work from special dropbox lockers. According to a report in Retail Week, Amazon is planning to introduce a system whereby customers can choose to have their goods sent to a secure location in a nearby shopping centre. Lockers will be available in low rent areas, such as corridors, and use some kind of display and keypad system.
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