[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by ApK

Let's say that there are two ebook buyers in the whole world.

If they both buy a book from Amazon and one of them also buys from somewhere else, then Amazon have a 66% market share, but 100% percent of the customers.
In other words, even if that 48% is correct, we know many people buy from Amazon AND other places as well, so Amazon may have far more than 48% of ebook buyers as their customers. (Or there could be just one guy buying 48% of all the ebooks from Amazon.....)

And in any case, you are mistaken: Amazon will happily take anyone's money...they can read their Kindle books in the cloud viewer, or on their computer, or Android device, or iThing. Amazon will even happily take their money and give them a Kindle to read on.

Amazon will take their money, but why will people buy something they cannot use? If you only want to read on your reader, and you don't have a Kindle, then you're not going to buy from Amazon. Most people with readers aren't going to buy something they have to read on their computer or their cellphone, because otherwise what is the point of having their reader?

And as far as your initial analogy, that is still skewed. If 48% (or 1 of every two ebook reader owners) has a kindle, then the non kindle owner is not going to buy from amazon. Note that the market share is not based on ebook sales, but on reader sales. Consider reader sales figures as a maximum market size. That same study estimates that 12.8 million ereaders were sold worldwide last year, and roughly 3 million in 2009. Lets just say based on those figures that there have been a grand total of 30 million sold total (estimating for year to date in 2011, for sales in 2008 and earlier, as well as rounding to a nice workable number). Now lets add in tablet sales. One report I saw claimed that on average 1.4 ebooks were sold per tablet (still trying to find that report to link), and based on current estimates, there is 28 million iPads, 1.2 million android tablets, 134 million android phones, and 74 million iphones. Now if we assume that 100% of those are still in use, and that there is no device overlap (or at least the devices see enough usage to not effect things for this basic thought process), we add those up and get 237 million for sake of arguement, lets round to 250 million for ease and potential sales increases. Now, we have 280 million potential devices that can read ebooks. You know that if you have the hottest everyone must have ebook, you cannot sell more than 280 million copies world wide. We've established before than 48% of ereaders are Kindles, and other info suggests that 50% of ebook sales are via Amazon. A Kindle exclusive halves the potential market by half. Lets say that we're talking about the ebook marketshare, and not based on reader marketshare, and that can be skewed upward in the method you mention, the numbers still come out to that the number of potential buyers is half of what it would be if you sold the book nonexclusive. Now most of the numbers I threw up are more or less just long way around to get to my point, they still need to be taken in by authors and publishers. If you have an ebook from a top selling big name author, by making that choice to be exclusive, you're potentially cutting yourself off from making millions more than you could be. We've got that 280 million number, the 50% estimate, and lets just say that you hope to sell to 1% of the total market, and your book is selling for $10. By being amazon exclusive, your book may only have $14 million in total sales, compared to the potential $28 million. That is a huge chunk of money you could be leaving on the table, and I doubt Amazon can justify or afford to buy your exclusivity at that rate.

Originally Posted by ApK

What Amazon is discouraging, is for someone to buy a competing device (which is most likely integrated with a competing ebook store), and by all market accounts, their strategy has worked brilliantly. Again, they seriously seem to not need business advice from us.

Oh yeah, from Amazon's end it is brilliant. I am not arguing against Amazon's standpoint here. I thought the discussion was about authors and their books being Kindle exclusive.

Originally Posted by ApK

Some choose to not be Amazon customers for various reasons...they want another stores device, or the insist on ePub or they think Amazon is evil, but the anti-monopoly types should rejoice in the fact that people can choose to utterly lock themselves out of Amazon if they want to.

How does that make any sense? "Yay! Down with monopolies! I can't buy from a retailer that has their own proprietary format that will not work on anything but their own devices or software!" I mean, that sort of thing is more or less what monopolies are, when companies use their size to control what those in the market can or cannot buy from. Someone who is antiestablishmentary enough to hate monopolies, will see that as a bad thing because in a market with no monopolies or companies asserting control, the consumers would be able to buy from anyone regardless of device.