Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS
I wonder of this is more about "Amazon can sell stuff" than it is about "ebooks are taking off". I'd like to think it's the latter but I suspect there is no straightforward read-across from what Amazon's doing to what is happening in the rest of the ebook market.
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Try this:
It is about ebooks and reader gadgets becoming mainstream products in the US. (Thank you, Oprah Winfrey!) The most mature and *competitive* bookselling market on the planet sees no problem with walled-garden DRM'ed ebooks. That is significant, methinks.
It is about ebooks outselling Hardcovers, the sacred cow of the big publishing houses, by almost two-to-one. (It's pretty obvious now the price-fix price hike was about squeezing ebook buyers to make up for hardcover losses.)
It is about Kindle ebooks outselling the annointed industry standard by four-to-one.
It is about Amazon saying, in effect, "Enough with the Apple-FUD (20-plus percent market share? Really?), the Adobe-FUD about standards, the B&N price-cutting. Everybody's taken their shot at us and we're still ahead four-to-one where it counts; the money."
Amazon leads, the rest follow...far behind.
With those numbers, it's time for the competition to take a long hard look at their business models and decide what needs changing, because what they're doing isn't working.