Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Strnad
Tying ereaders to bookstores seems, in hindsight, like a dumb idea since it instigated the Gillette model on ebooks: Lose money on the razor (reader) and make your profit on the blades (books).
We'd have been better served if electronics stores had, from the very first, sold readers that were independent of any bookstore. Maybe then a single standard would have emerged, or stores would support multiple formats.
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You do remember this *was* the status quo before Kindle, right?
And Sony abandoned *their* walled garden to follow the standards bandwagon with the result that they're down to 4th place in sales and leapfrogged by two newcomers is barely a year.
It can be argued that it was the Walled garden approach is what allowed ebook readers to go from hobbyist tech toy/PC peripheral to a consumer item. (Not saying it is TRUTH, just that it can be debated.
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Even today, there are both hardware vendors and ebookstores playing by agnostic rules; and being outsold 10 to 1. The same thing happened in digital music; the Apple walled garden steam-rollered the multivendor standard approach.
The evidence so far suggests that in some businesses tight integration to make tech more accessible can be more compelling to the mass market than more open approaches. It is still too early in the game to say ebooks are one such, but the evidence (so far!) leans that way.