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Old 01-21-2013, 08:19 PM   #76
ereadingdotcom
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Posts: 46
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Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Device: iPad
Quote:
Originally Posted by derangedhermit View Post
The statement that epub creates "real competition" is incorrect. It could be so, if you had naive sellers, or hundreds of sellers of abou tthe same market size, but you do not. It is easy for the large epub booksellers to track each other's prices in real-time using software and price match (keep prices stable, or as high as possible). Airlines do it, retail chain stores do it, etc.

Amazon probably sees their only main competition in the west as Apple and Google. I don't know about China or India. I doubt the Chinese gov't will let any non-Chinese company be a dominant book seller in the future.
I respectfully disagree with you that real competition is not already taking place within the epub space. Amazon's marketshare has actually dropped, even as the overall pie has gotten larger. This is due almost exclusively to the growth of new competition.

As the focus on an ebookstore grows from creating a walled garden to providing value-added products and services, whomever does that will become a serious competitor to ALL of the "Big 3".

As we've been raising funds, the most common question we get is, "How will you take on Amazon." The answer is, we don't have to. The ebook business is exploding and people are looking for a superior alternative to the Big 3. I know, because we hear from those future customers EVERY DAY.

That superior solution just doesn't exist...yet. Once it does, word-of-mouth, media coverage, and that elusive animal, "buzz", will help take care of a great deal of that new company's success.

Put more succinctly, people once said that no one could possibly beat B. Dalton Booksellers. Then they said Waldenbooks would NEVER go out of business. Of course, they said, once those were gone, who could possibly compete with Borders?

Amazon is very, very far from invincible. ePub competitiveness is a big part of why they're feeling the heat, and their annual report numbers show that, too.
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