New Head of Amazon Digital Looks to Add E-titles

Jeff Blackburn has been named general manager of Amazon.com's newly formed worldwide digital group. The new unit, which will be responsible for the downloading of not only e-books but of music, DVDs, software and spoken-word audio, was created to centralize Amazon's digital programs and to scale it across product lines and into different countries.

Blackburn, who has worked in a number of different areas for Amazon over the last several years, told PW his immediate goal for Amazon's e-bookstore is to work with the major book publishers to have them speed up their release of e-book titles. Amazon's e-bookstore currently has about 1,700 titles, and Blackburn would like to double that quickly. "That catalogue is a little too thin," Blackburn noted. Blackburn is confident he can convince publishers to quicken the pace of e-book releases because the e-retailer plans to "merchandise and sell the product. We'll be able to show them numbers." He declined to discuss sales figures for Amazon's e-titles, noting only that sales have been building week by week since the store's November launch. He said the company has no plans to become an e-book publisher.

Amazon's e-books are available only in the Microsoft Reader format, although Blackburn said the company will be adding more formats over the course of the year. He said the company chose Reader because it was compatible with the largest number of devices (laptop and desktop PCs) in the market. Blackburn said he believes customers will be willing to read certain e-books on PC screens, such as business and technical titles.

Amazon has seen no cannibalization of the sale of printed titles since it began offering e-books, Blackburn said, and he strongly believes that digital/physical packages of titles will "be a big part" of Amazon's business.