In his latest column, consultant Mike Shatzkin asked two questions :
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When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop?
Who will be left standing when it does?
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He then goes on to give a nice analysis of Amazon's rise, focusing on Amazon's strategic vision :
Quote:
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Amazon was not the first online bookseller. But they appear to have had several distinctions from all others from the beginning. One is that they always saw bookselling as a springboard to a much larger business. That meant that bookselling was, perhaps primarily, a customer acquisition tool, not an end in itself. A second is that they saw, long before it was accepted general wisdom, that perfecting the “customer experience” online was the core requirement for success. And the combination of those two things, in concert with the ubiquitous availability of capital for promising Internet propositions that characterized the late 1990s, fueled growth powered by aggressive pricing that has had their trading partners and competitors agape for nearly two decades.
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and its execution. RTWT.
LINK
So far the efforts of the publishers, Apple, Google, et all, have only slowed down, not stopped, Amazon's rise. It maybe that there will be NO ONE there at the end, save Apple . Apple will be dominating the "enhanced" ebook end-the book apps, electronic textbooks, etc. But for straight narrative text, it may be just be Amazon and a few niche booksellers.