Bezos on book pricing, failed business ventures and Hachette

4 December 2014 Books+Publishing

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has spoken about book pricing, the company’s failed business ventures and its dispute with Hachette in an widely publicised ‘in conversation’ at Business Insider’s Ignition conference in New York. ‘Book prices in my view are too expensive,’ he told the audience. ‘If you realize that what [books] are really competing with is Candy Crush, then you’d start to say, “Gosh, maybe we should work on reducing friction on long-form reading.”’ Bezos also spoke about Amazon’s failed business ventures and the company’s lack of profits. ‘I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally. None of those things are fun, but also they don’t matter. What matters is companies that don’t continue to experiment or embrace failure eventually get in the position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence.’ He added, ‘If you look at our stock price over a year, five years, ten years, it all looks pretty great. It’s a volatile stock. It always has been. It probably will be. We’re a large company, but in many ways because of all our emerging businesses, we’re still a startup, and there’s a lot of volatility with startups … It’s like we built this lemonade stand 20 years ago. It’s become very profitable, but we decided to use our skills for a hamburger stand and a hotdog stand and so on.’ On the subject of the company’s recent dispute with Hachette over trading terms, Bezos observed that ‘it’s an essential job of any retailer to negotiate hard on behalf of customers’, but added that ‘rarely does it break through into a kind of a public fight’.

Category: International news