Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
"B&M retail"? What do you mean by that?
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Sorry. Didn't mean to be obscure.
The idea is that ebooks are mainstream enough, now, that online sales alone are not sufficient to reach all potential buyers; that interest is spreading to consumers that need to physically handle the product before buying.
Amazon's Bezos alluded to this a few weeks back, during the K3 intro, when he said they intended to get Kindles into the retail market beyond the handful of airport Kiosks and Target stores that now carry kindle.
Naturally, if the top three reader vendors (by volume) Kindle, Nook, and Sony, all have physical retail presence, any would-be competitor will have to either match that presence or risk getting shut out of that segment of the market. And, of course, that entails a whole new can of worms for the vendor with issues of channel conflict, supplying the pipeline, inventory distribution and management. Companies are going to have to grow substantially to be able to stay in the game.
Which might explain the upcoming PBG IPO; it's one quick way to raise capital to grow the company.