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Originally Posted by Nathanael
Your link is simply CNET regurgitating an Amazon press release. Now, I won't say press releases aren't credible but -- well, they're not credible. Most independent estimates I've seen placed Amazon's market share at around 60%.
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Actually, press releases from publicly traded companies are very credible, as making material misstatements to the public is both a crime and one that the SEC prosecutes frequently. Of course you have to parse the language *very* carefully.
Amazon has stated that around 20% of their e-book sales are from people without Kindles. (The majority of whom are probably people with iDevices). Presumably that means 60% of the e-book buyers own kindles, and 20% are buying e-books on a Kindle app, give the 80% number.
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iBooks isn't a format, it's an app. The iBooks format is epub.
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Sorry, I should have said "epub format with Apple's fairplay DRM".
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Second, I'm not really sure how much the ereader market matters. Another MR thread is currently discussing a CNET article which predicts that ereaders are a doomed technology, and CNET may be right. The explosion of the tablet market, and the migration of ereading capabilities to many multi-function devices, will certainly eat into dedicated ereader sales (iPad sales alone, according to the IDC report, are expected to be nearly triple the entire ereader market in 2011), as casual readers will have even less reason to drop money on a dedicated device. My own wife is chomping at the bit to get an iPad for reading; she finds my ereader useless. And once I move to a tablet, I may not keep my ereader around either. And I'm sure we're not the only ones. So it's not simply a matter of Amazon competing in the dedicated ereader market, but trying to establish .azw ubiquity across the entire technology industry.
I fear any discussion on epub vs azw that limits itself to the dedicated reader market may be missing the larger picture.
--Nathanael
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I'm not buying the e-readers-are-doomed-argument yet. Many people own iPads and Kindles, for example, and a lot of people don't care to read novels on LCD screens.
Certainly the iPad has not meaningfully harmed Kindle sales yet, with Amazon selling as many Kindles in the first 70-odd days of 4Q of 2010 as they sold in 2009. But of course they will have lost *some* sales to tablets...but right now the data doesn't suggest that tablets are harming e-ink readers very much at all.