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Originally Posted by fjtorres
To make money, of course.
The issue isn't whether publishers should help Amazon, but rather will they let Amazon help them make money.
Kindle is *already* a global product and people with Kindles buy a *lot* of books. The installed ebook reader base make be small in some markets but it is growing in all of them. And Kindle is not going away. It is just a matter of time before it becomes too big to ignore.
At this point in time, publishers' only choice is whether to support ebooks or not.
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The point is if they will make any additional money. It would be rather pointless to replace e.g. revue of 1 million € selling a book as paper book with 600,000 € selling the same book as ebook for Kindle. Will people who buy books via Kindle buy so many more books than they would have bought as paper books to make it a good business for the publishers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
If they choose to make money off ebooks they must support *all* significant players; Kindle, Apple, ADEPT, and Google. Otherwise they would be leaving money on the table for their competitors and no executive will last long in his office if he cedes entire segments of a growing market to his competitors out of spite.
(Edit: And bear in mind that the big 6 are *already* supporting ebooks on Kindle in most markets. They *know* how much money Amazon makes for them. So why "support" Kindle in one market and not another? When Kindle launches a German-language--or French or Spanish--ebookstore they won't lack for books from the BPHs.)
Money talks and in the language of money, Kindle talks loud.
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This basically assumes that books are something of a commodity. If you don't get the book by author A for your Kindle you will buy the book by author B instead. Perhaps the market does work that way but I would have rather assumed that people would buy the book written by author A as a paper book instead of buying something different, just because the other book happens to be available for Kindle.