Amazon: Education product, service or platform?

Google, Apple, MS, Intel all have touched the education sector, either through publishing or through digital initiatives to grab market shares in the large, attractive digital learning business. Recently Amazon acquired TenMarks, and Intel acquired Knos, both of them aim at K-12 education market. The strategy for Amazon to move forward is not very clear. We only know so far Amazon will have more offerings to its kindle users with kids as the product from Tenmarks will be included in the kindle. Whether Amazon will start to build educational learning platforms, possibly they may have done so, or just keeps themselves as a selling platform for digital educational products actually makes a huge difference for Amazon.

Amazon has a sector for publishing: they started to enter the trade publishing to chase for producing bestsellers, an average chance of less than 1% industrywide and bet on it. However their recent shift in Amazon publishing leadership may prove that this strategy did not work very well so far: B&N, which takes a large share in  physical book distribution in the US, fighted back by refusing selling Amazon physical books. When more than 50% of sales of books still come from physical books, Amazon may have a hard time signing best seller authors. Meanwhile trade book profit is far below the profit from educational publishing. Then the answer for Amazon for publishing is sort of clear: why not education publishing, why not digital education publishing, or why not digital learning?

for Amazon acquisition of TenMarks:here and for Intel, Kno here.