Quote:
Originally Posted by apbschmitz
I wonder if eReaders will be like inkjet printers back in the day, when manufacturers were happy to give them away so you'd be buying ink cartridges for years to come. Seems to me that the money is in selling the content, not selling the device. So why not make the device as cheap as possible?
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1. That would make it even harder for a new reader not tied to a content provider to enter the market. Less innovation, less competition.
2. It would also increase the incentive for reader manufacturers to only support reading their own content. Less standardization, less competition.
3. It would also tend to keep content prices high. People that read a lot of books would be subsidizing people that only read a few books. One more excuse for publishers to use in trying to rationalize high book prices.
As evil as mandatory use of proprietary printer cartridges is, e-book format walled gardens are worse. You can pick one printer manufacturer to gouge you for print cartridges and still be able to do all your printing with a single printer. To the extent that any of the books you want to read are available in only one format and those books are split among more than one format, you "have" to buy more than one reader. (The dead horse of people doing their own format shifting need not be beaten here. Whether or not the DRM wars can ever be won, high stakes fueled escalation can waste a lot resources of everyone on both sides for a long time.)