[Synamon]

If the agency model was so gosh-darn necessary to protect the little guy from big bad Amazon, why didn't the Big 6 insist on it for paper books?

*crickets*

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Is this true:

Two years after the agency model came to bookselling, Amazon is losing its chokehold on the e-book market: its share has fallen from about 90% to roughly 60%.

Correlation does not equal causation.

The ebook marketplace is brand new and Amazon was well placed from the start, introducing the Kindle 1st generation reader in 2007 and Kindle 2 in early 2009, going international with it before the end of that year. The first Nook didn't hit the market until late 2009 and the first Kobo showed up mid-2010. Sony was their only competition 2 years ago. As the pie for eReaders and ebooks has grown much larger others have grabbed small pieces of it. I haven't seen any evidence that agency pricing had anything to do with the way the marketplace evolved.