Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Amazon were already the leading eBook seller due to their ownership of MobiPocket.
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Harry,
This is simply not true. If you purely want to talk about ebook content (not hardware or software), many other ebook sellers outsell mobi, including ereader.com, fictionwise.com, ellora's cave, and possibly also ebooks.com. Amazon was never even in the top 3 of ebook sellers in the english language, even when they had a big tab on their books page for ebooks and edocs (that was before they took over mobi).
For all the hype, Sony only made it into the top 3 for a brief period of time after they released their reader. And the only reason they made it that far was because they were giving away a $50 content credit with every device sold last year. Once all those $50 credits got used, they fell out of the top 5 again.
The small privately held companies, whose only business is ebooks, have always dominated. I don't see kindle changing that, either, long term. Once the initial hype has died down it will be like sony: they'll pop up in the rankings for a quarter or two then slide back down into oblivion.