July 1, 2003
Read Any Good Books Lately?... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
The wild popularity of Harry Potter books among the post-Internet young teen set is undeniable, but this latest one has made history.
Arguably it's an historic event any time millions of kids actually clamor to read an 870-page book instead of watching television, playing video games or just simply loafing, but it's also a technology event which can't be ignored.
Of the 5 million books sold the very first weekend, well over 1 million were ordered online and hand-delivered to the reader's door by Fedex, some 250,000 books that very Saturday morning.
Cordoning off whole sections of its distribution centers, Amazon created special ID badges and enlisted roving guards to patrol the perimeters. And the morning of the book's release had the undeniable feel of a "Mission Impossible" episode - 20,000 determined Fedex drivers driving from house to house, their trucks filled to the brim with books, their routes planned meticulously by computers and studied beforehand.
There were anxious kids peering out windows, until brown Amazon boxes were finally grasped and ripped open. All across America, the same scene played out again and again - the drivers were Santa, and this was Christmas.
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Of course, what this is really about is money, and another word we haven't tossed around much lately: "eCommerce."
With Amazon offering a 40% discount and - for some customers - a free Saturday delivery upgrade, this entire stealth operation completely eclipsed your local bookstore. And it's not even clear that Amazon made any money on the deal.
Now make no mistake, Amazon is in this for the long haul, and what they really wanted was to be permanently etched into the consciousness of entire families. This is the kind of persuasion that only an extremely positive and significant experience can buy, and it must marry expectation with performance, engendering a positive feeling that somehow lingers and sticks.
Pretty clever those Amazon guys - in that sense, this was certainly a golden opportunity.
But for Federal Express, this was just business as usual. In the face of all the magic that infuses every Harry Potter book, Federal Express managed to issue a press release which erased all the magic. It talks of "transportation solutions" and Fedex's quest to use "technological capabilities to extend peace of mind to our customers." Would it have been to so wrong to just say a quarter-million happy kids spent the weekend reading?
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Business is frequently compared to war, citing the victors and the vanquished. All that seems to matter is whether you win and your competitors lose. So you might say that the economics of selling books is under siege, and technology is the caralyst. If Amazon and Fedex can cut out your local bookstore, what will happen to it? Should it hire all-night pizza delivery people and make an attempt to get the book to your house even earlier?
I don't believe that local bookshops will go the way of travel agencies, if only because there's something socially tangible about roaming the bookshelves, seeing the books and talking with the staff.
Still, the experience of this Saturday in June, of this fifth Harry Potter book with its nearly 10 million American editions ordered up in its very first week out, will have far-reaching consequences well after the last page is turned, and the kids place their favorite book in its treasured place.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
