If you’re like me, you know a thing or two about the book business but you didn’t know there was a business called Twitch until you heard the announcement this morning that Amazon had bought it for about $1 billion, apparently outbidding or somehow finessing Google to make the purchase.
Twitch, I have learned, streams video games played by champions and by amateurs, and has a business because people watch other people playing video games in substantial numbers. Since Amazon is so existentially important to anybody in the book business, anything they do is of interest to those of us in the book business. But not everything they do — think selling cloud computing capabilities or running a marketplace for all sorts of non-book goods — has much to do with the book business.
Whether Twitch is something we book people have to understand or fear or gain benefit from is not clear to me yet. (I’ve only known about it for a few hours.) But Amazon’s purchase of it brings forth some points worth considering.
1. In the digital age, new pastimes can spring up and become large very quickly. At the very least, the millions (or billions) of minutes consumers are spending with Twitch are not being spent reading, or watching a movie, or watching the sporting events we used to think were dominant.
2. Amazon is both in the “selling stuff” business and in the “consumer attention” business. This is definitely the latter and might also be the former.
3. One informed observation from James McQuivey about the acquisition was that it showed Amazon wants to control as much content as it can. Twitch is a content-streaming machine, not just a game-hosting site.
4. It has long been the contention of some publishing visionaries like Bob Stein that the digital revolution for books will, in the long run, not just be about the form of delivery and consumption of the same old stuff books have always been (which is pretty much what the ebook revolution has been so far) but that over time what we call a “book” will become something quite different. Stein’s particular interest is in the book as a social construct, where the comments and annotations of many readers can become part of the intellectual property itself for subsequent readers. Stein told me that he sees this as a “game-changer” (pun perhaps intended), suddenly making Amazon a leader in the gaming world. He also sees the “second screen phenomenon” as exemplified by Twitch as extensible to other live events, like concerts and lectures and even television. He has clearly followed gaming for a long time.
Richard Nash expressed a similar idea in a recent speech: that ebooks mean that books are now “reading services”, not “objects”. Does Twitch point the way to that? Are we on the verge of “watching people read” in any substantial numbers? Or, at the very least, looking at the detritus of other people’s reading with interest?
It could be that Amazon’s acquisition of Twitch means exactly the same thing to Penguin Random House, Netflix, and the New York Yankees, just constituting another way people can spend their time which reduces what they have available to spend with older media forms and older brands. But Amazon having acquired it and the massive (and, frankly, unexpected by those of us not in the gaming world) participation it has to consume “media” that are totally outside the historical creators’ domain is another reminder that books in a virtual world particularly have competition that we wouldn’t have dreamed of 20 years ago. The Wall Street Journal says Twitch is the 4th largest source of US internet traffic, and the Times says it’s among the 15 most-trafficked sites in the world
And it certainly adds a dimension to an observation I offered 18 months ago: that books are becoming part of other people’s businesses, not just a business on its own. We’re living in an increasingly complicated world.
We haven’t switched off of Feedburner yet (maybe next week) so many of you might not know about the post I just did suggesting a combination that could compete with Amazon for media sales. It’s right here.