Sainsbury’s Competes Against Amazon

By Laura Elliott.

UK retailer Sainsbury’s has placed itself in direct competition with the online retail giant Amazon, after buying a book-downloading website for £1. Currently, Amazon dominates the e-book market with the Kindle e-reader.

Supermarket giant Sainsbury’s has bought a 64% stake in the Anobii website from the struggling High Street chain HMV. Already, the retailer offers around 400,000 book titles online, compared with the 60,000 offered by Anobii.

The downloading website, which can also be used as a social network, boasts 600,000 members. Reportedly, Sainsbury’s hopes to combine the new brand and website into the Sainsbury’s Entertainment brand, the Amazon competitor which was launched for the first time in 2011.

As reported by This is Money, Sainsbury’s head of digital entertainment, Mark Bennett, said that “This acquisition shows our commitment to becoming a key player in the digital entertainment market”.

Other owners of the website Anobii are the publishers HarperCollins, Penguin and Random House.

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Posted by admin on Jun 13 2012. Filed under International, Latest News, Product News, Retail News, Retail technology, Supermarkets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry