Investors have been lapping up Amazon stock since the Internet behemoth released an earnings report that largely failed to meet expectations.
So why didn't the stock drop, as one would expect?
Conventional wisdom is failing when it comes to the yet unknown aspects of Internet marketing.
CEO and founder Jeff Bezos laid it all out for investors, and what he had to say was enough to charm those who hold large quantities of Amazon stock, and those who think it would be wise of them to follow suit.
Physical book sales declined over the past year, according to Mr. Bezos, but that does not worry him at all.
Digital publishing, he said, is a multi-billion (yest, with a "b") dollar category for Amazon.
Digital sales are up and climbing.
Where once people waited for the paperback version of a new book to be released, so that they could afford to buy, people now turn to the cheaper version of today. The e-book.
Amazon owns its own digital publishing firm. Twenty-three of the authors who publish via the Kindle Direct program sold over 250,000 copies of their books.
Those are books that will not yield a payday for a single major publisher. All the profit goes to Amazon, and the author gets a small encomium for their troubles.
There are no deals to be worked out in regards to the percentage the author gets. It's take it or leave it. If you want your book to appear on Amazon, the largest online book seller, you have to accept their terms.
It's a business model that investors like, because the firm in which they own stock holds all the trump cards.
And authors don't have much of a choice.
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