Amazon wants to be in pictures
Published 9:00 pm Friday, July 28, 2006
No longer content to remain in the online retail market, Amazon.com is heading into the movie business, even as the company’s profit projections disappoint and its stock tumbles.
The Seattle-based giant launched in 1995 as a bookstore and is now the world’s largest online retailer, selling products as diverse as breakfast bars and ball bearings. Now, it has purchased the rights to turn the best-selling novel “The Stolen Child” into a feature-length film.
The move into multimedia comes only days after Amazon reported that its second-quarter earnings were down nearly 60 percent compared with the same period last year, despite an increase in revenue and traffic. It was the sixth consecutive quarter the company had showed a decline in profit, sending the firm’s stock price down 22 percent Wednesday in Nasdaq trading.
Amazon did not disclose how much it paid author Keith Donohue for the movie rights. The deal, which has caused many analysts to scratch their heads, follows other investments in content and technology that have been criticized. Amazon recently said, for instance, that it was moving into the grocery business, typically a low-margin arena.
Even as Amazon struggles financially, it continues to morph. In order to bring more traffic to its Web site and hold visitors longer, Amazon has begun offering original content, following the lead of other Web sites.
The debut novel by Donohue concerns a young boy who is kidnapped by hobgoblins and replaced with a changeling. Two narrators tell the parallel stories of the young human living with mythical creatures and the impostor learning the ways of humans. The novel was inspired by an 1886 poem by William Butler Yeats.
The book, which was published in May by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of German media giant Bertelsmann AG, was slow to be reviewed by mainstream outlets. But Amazon sent galleys to 100 of the site’s top customer reviewers, who lauded it. That helped propel the book to the top of Amazon’s fiction list, much the way bloggers and other non-mainstream media outlets such as YouTube create groundswells of their own. Positive reviews followed, in The Washington Post, USA Today and elsewhere.
The book has sold more than 30,000 copies, an impressive figure for a debut novel by an unknown author. Amazon hopes to translate that success to the movie screen. The company is seeking studio partners that would produce and distribute the movie, but would not name studios it is talking to.
If the film is made – far from a sure thing – Amazon would use its platform to market the movie and sell DVD copies. The book’s fantastical story line could play well on the screen, thanks to special effects, and might be able to tap into the audience that made “Harry Potter” and “The Lord of the Rings” blockbuster films.
