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Originally Posted by neilmarr
Yep, SensualPoet -- and apologies to Harry T who seems to have got it right after all. It's an Amazon screw-up....<snip, snip, snip>
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Well said, Neilmarr. IMHO Amazon is one huge, raging screwup. They're the walmart of online webcentric sales. Now while I do admit that they should not have the majority power they do at this time, I really have only the other companies on the web to blame. It's the same reason that Microsoft became the big, scary, evil monster they are today. In the early days of computing, if one of the other corporations had gotten their act together early and properly, Microsoft would have died early and painfully. But as it was, nobody could compete against them because they had their heads shoved so far up their collective behinds that it looked like an ostrich convention.
The same thing is happening with Amazon and the ebook market. Even though Amazon is uber evil, they got in early and did all the right things to make themselves the majority player while everyone else sat around, and in many respects is still sitting around with their heads rammed firmly up their posteriors. It won't be until someone new comes on the scene and gets it right that Amazon will lose their crown. How long will that be? Well, at the rate things are going, probably another 6-8 years. The only way that'll be quicker is if either the current players get their acts together, or someone new comes in with all the right answers and skyrockets to the top, surpassing Amazon.
But, alas, I doubt that'll happen. Take the PC world for instance. While Microsoft isn't unseated yet in the desktop world, they've been completely crushed by Linux in every other single market, save for console gaming, and that's an area it's not directly involved in. But it took Linux coming up from nothing and doing everything right for darned near 10 years before they really started putting the hurt on Redmond. Much the same thing can be seen in the movie and music worlds as well, and I fear will also repeat itself in the ebook world too. So bend over, grab the lube, and get ready for ten more miserable years until someone finally unseats Amazon and puts the ebook world straight.
Am I being pessimistic? Nah. It's more that I'm being a hard line realist telling a truth that nobody wants to hear. Plus, I have the unnerving feeling that Ebooks are going to very soon hit a stagnation point and stay there until Amazon is knocked out of the market as the majority player. Competition always drives innovation and expansion. Amazon's actions are extremely counter to any form of competition, as they work hard to kill it anywhere it pops up. And without competition, innovation and expansion wither and die on the vine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I did exactly the same - I used xe.com to convert £5.95 into US$ and got $9.50 or so. It seems too close to be a coincidence. The £ has been rising against the $ all week, so it probably was $9.14 a few days ago.
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Actually, the dollar isn't *rising* against the pound. It's actually falling. The whole rising and falling thing in terms of money is sorta counter intuitive. It's considered as "rising" when less dollars are required to purchase a pound sterling, and "falling" when it takes more dollars to purchase the same amount of pounds.