Let’s say you’re a company who sells sandwiches. Really tasty sandwiches. And you package these great sandwiches and resell them through a variety of great outlets, stores around the world. Some of these are great big chains of stores. And they like your sandwiches, buy a lot of them, and resell them to customers. Been doing it for years.
So what do you do one of your biggest chains of stores decides, “Hey, we can make these sandwiches ourselves to sell to customers!”
Awkward? Uncomfortable? Unusual?
What if we weren’t talking sandwiches but content. Is that what Barnes & Noble is now doing with Quamut?
My first impression of the site is that it looks pretty cool. Clean, simple, easy-to-use format. Utilizes Web 2.0 features like tagging and a Wiki. Covers a variety of solid, necessary topics. Pretty cool, overall.
But, um, isn’t this what we already sell? Is this what many of our competitors already sell? Haven’t we been selling this type of product through B&N forever? Don’t we have all that same content available to share with the world? Did publishers let one of our main business partners down somehow so that they decided to start doing what we already do? Or did they just really like the idea and decide they didn’t need us to accomplish it.
I’m not trying to cause any trouble here because like I said…I really like the site. I have a feeling I’ll start using it. This type of thing is the future for content providers (like us).
But will it hurt book sales? Publishers wouldn’t like that right now with what’s already happening, would they?
[...] Or not? [...]