Quote:
Originally Posted by K-Thom
Taken a look at the numbers of (eInk) devices sold outside Amazon country? Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa combined don't even get close to Amazon's market share.
So ePub right now (after 2 years of heavy promoting) still is ranked no. 3 behind PDF and AZW/MOBI. And ADE-DRM isn't acutally doing ePub any good. The race is far from being finished.
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The sheer number of devices sold is rather meaningless as long as these sales are mostly restricted to the US and perhaps the UK.
The success of Amazon in other markets will depend on their ability to offer content in other languages, as the overwhelming majority of readers want to read books in their national languages. Right now Amazon has no or basically no content in German, Japanese and French. Spanish and Italian don't seem to be represented any better. Therefore Amazon has no real ebook presence in the largest global book markets with the exception of the US and the UK. I'm quite sure that the large publishing houses are not keen to see Amazon's dominance of the US ebook market replicated anywhere else. Therefore they will rather prefer to see the ebook markets grow steadily with epub than to surrender themselves to the control by Amazon.