Quote:
Originally Posted by vaughnmr
And maybe they don't want to have to deal with the nightmare drm provided with Adobe ADE.
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Not everybody gets nightmares from dealing with ADE. But, yes; it does happen.
I suspect the lack of epub support by the Kindle ebookstore (as opposed to the reader or app) may be because in the ADEPT ecosystem the quality of the user experience is not *entirely* determined by Amazon; with Kindle, Amazon is entirely responsible for solving any problem the user has, whether it be due to hardware, software, or content issues. Tying your brand to a competitor's product and putting your reputation at the mercy of your competitor's user support--which is known to be... not-as-comprehensive--is not something a smart manager willingly does.
To put it another way: some of the issues faced by some ADEPT DRM buyers are due simply to the fact that nobody is *solely* responsible for solving *every* problem. The hardware vendor is only responsible for the hardware; Adobe only cares about activations and authorizations, and the bookstore only responds to content issues. The better hardware vendors *will* try to solve as many of the interaction issues that arise as they can but if the issue turns out to be due to a failing in the ADE app on the PC side they have no choice but to pass the buck. Conversely, some issues are due to inconsistent implementations of Mobile ADE on the device side which is something Adobe has no control over so they too have to often pass the buck.
With Kindle, there is no buck-passing possible.
Amazon can be quite draconian when dealing with customer misbehavior and, yes, like any organization composed of humans, they screw up from time to time. But they do understand that their *long-term* survival is tied to customer satisfaction. The unavoidable reality is that Amazon could never *guarantee* the *same* level of satisfaction to ePub customers.
On a more prosaic side, there is the simple reality that Amazon selling ADEPT ePubs adds value to competing products and, worse, a competing ecosystem. Amazon is betting that *in the long term* it is better to forgo any extra revenue from ePub sales than to rake in short term sales from propping up a competitor. Factor in that the Kindle back-end systems are Amazon owned and operated and that there are few if any licensing fees and royalties due on the ebook format or DRM, and add in the larger installed base of Kindle book buyers, and the economics of ePub book sales becomes even more marginal to Amazon in the short term. Simply put, there likely isn't enough money to be made in ePubs to offset the strategic cost of propping up a competitor. (Microsoft, for one, has long made about as much money off Macintoshes as Apple through its sales of Office so their infamous $200 million loan to Apple in its darkest hour wasn't just about staving off the antitrust regulators. But it sure has come back to haunt them, no?) As a rule, it is safest to let competitors sink or swim on their own.
A third consideration: as the recent press release made clear, Amazon's operates on *very* lean profit margins. On their $10 billlion in sales in Q4/2010 they netted under $500 million in profits. That's in the 4% range. Because of their recent investments in updating their infrastructure, the state of the economy, etc, they just warned their expected profit margins could fall into the 2% range. Well, guess what? on a $10 ebook, Adobe's flat fee of 22 cents works out to 2.2%. On cheaper books (~80% of the Kindle store catalog) that would wipe out their profits. Amazon may or not be selling ebooks at a loss as their competitors claim but odds are that selling ADEPT ePubs is not going to be adding much net to the bottom line.
To make it work Amazon would have to either:
1- price ePubs higher than azw's and whether the "gouging" complaints of the second-class customers
2- explicitly break out the Adobe "tax" and deal with the wrath of Adobe
3- eat the Adobe "tax", in effect paying to support their enemies *and* face the risk of attracting the attention of the trust-busters and Brussel-crats for what could be plausibly be portrayed as predatory pricing and monopolistic behavior
4- introduce and license a new (fourth!) ePub DRM scheme under their control and face the same regulatory threats as eating the costs of ADEPT
Right now, for a consumer, choosing the Kindle ecosystem or the ADEPT ecosystem (or the Fairplay one, for that matter) is a matter of trading off the design features of each system and picking the one they'll live with for the forseeable future. Whichever ecosystem they choose they face the *exact same* choice of DRM lock-in vs (theoretically) breaking the law to DeDRM their purchases. If they stick to the letter of the law, lock-in to Adobe (or Apple) in no different from Lock-in to Amazon. Alternately, if they choose to break DRM the format of the store content becomes irrelevant.
Amazon selling ePubs offers little if any benefits to Amazon and few if any benefits to consumers since it only benefits those that think ePub is internally magical *and* refuse to DeDRM their ebooks. Not a particularly big market, really.
Really, folks, one size doesn't fit all.
And multiple (well-supported) formats are not the end of the world.
The only reason why anybody would care overmuch about Amazon supporting ePub is if they find the ePub ecosystem "defficient" when compared to the Kindle value equation and we all know that it isn't, right?
