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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I didn't. A bookstore you can't even *browse* without a $500 piece of hardware? No chance it's ever going to dominate the market. (Notice how Apple's never released any info about what kind of sales the ibookstore has.)
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Oh, Apple's ibook sales have been miserable, there's no question.
But almost all of the articles from the first half of 2010 are about how the Kindle won't be able to compete with the iPad (at that time, the Kindle 2 cost $260 and the DX was only $10 cheaper). And Apple did, of course, dominate the digital music business, its iPhone was wildly successful...and the iPad looked to be a great new product.
So people weren't irrational to think that Apple would be a huge new presence in e-books...it was hard to imagine that they wouldn't be, much less that they would end up basically a footnote. And certainly the press was filled with questions about how much the Kindle would lose to the iPad.
However, as it turned out: (1) most heavy readers seem to prefer e-ink; and (2) while the iPad has sold far more devices than the Kindle, most people don't seem to be using their Ipad for much reading.
Some of this is because Amazon reacted so quickly - the iPad came out in April, and 4 months later Amazon announced the k3 - $140 in its cheapest incarnation, *and* with an improved screen. Plus Amazon pushed to make its apps ubiquitous, including on the iPad.
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iTunes took over because anyone could access it through their home computer, not just through their iPhones. And because it works well as a music library--none of the ebook store/device software does that, because they're all caught by the format problems.
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Yeah - especially when it first came out, iTunes was so much better than the competition that it was almost ridiculous.