But I thought Amazon was our FRIEND....
Luckily for us,theyre are other players out there, and they aren't rolling over and playing dead. Kobo is making a player as a global ebook retailer, And Apple and Google are also there. Mike Shatzkin sees it this way:
Quote:
With the deals announced at Frankfurt by Kobo with the English retailer WHSmith and the French retailer Fnac along with the quickening pace of store openings by Apple and Amazon, the future shape of the ebook retailing landscape has been more clearly defined. It looks to me like we’ll have three principal global players that will be active in every market — they being Amazon, Apple, and Kobo — plus perhaps a local contender in each market as well. Barnes & Noble has played the latter role extremely successfully so far in the United States; Waterstone’s will attempt the same in the UK starting next Spring; there is local competition in Germany; and certainly there will be in many other countries as the ebook revolution laps at their shores. Google, being Google, will not go away, but they will remain a relatively marginal player unless and until they put considerably more energy into their solution and into promoting what they have.
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As long as there are other big players out there, Amazon might have the upper hand, but they won't be a monopoly.