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Originally Posted by KenJackson
Please don't think I'm starting a real business. This is a hypothetical exercise.
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OK then, hypothetically speaking then:
It is much easier to start an ebook store with 300k titles than a paper book (online) store that offers 300k titles.
However, you are vastly underestimating the resources involved.
You still need rock-solid web servers, secure credit-card processing, sophisticated databases to both run your website and track sales, customer service, advertising, and people to set up and run your company and system 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You are not going to have much luck running a setup like that out of your cousin's basement.
I'm pretty sure you'd need at least some outside funding, most likely from VC's who are going to think you're nuts for taking on Amazon, Apple, B&N and others.
Unless you have some take on things, or offer a service, that is both unique and difficult for the big companies to replicate.
And again, major corporations that
already have a lot of these advantages are entering the space and getting destroyed (cf Borders/Kobo).
Quote:
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Originally Posted by KenJackson
I went looking for a bar graph or chart of annual book sales vs publisher but couldn't find one. It would be interesting to see if the tail is as long on that graph as you suggest.
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I'm not sure what you mean by that, especially since I'm not saying the long tail is not important or had nothing to do with Amazon's success. My point is only that it is
one element among many.
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Originally Posted by KenJackson
And yes, some totally unexplored aspect of ebooks could give excellent traction, and that would be an effect. And since ebook sales are so new, I'm sure there are some of those to be found.
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Yep, it's possible so I wouldn't rule it out. But the key is that if someone small is going to blow up big on that basis, it needs to be unique and difficult to replicate. I don't believe ebooks offers that particular combination.