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Originally Posted by MovieBird
No, it would level the playing field. Once DRM no longer locks people into a specific platform, then competing stores will participate in a battle to the death with prices. If Amazon gets too greedy, a young upstart company will eat their lunch.
Assuming the customers can freely move back and forth between storefronts.
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On a level playing field, the strongest player wins. Amazon would crush the competition, since customers would have no reason to go elsewhere.
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Originally Posted by MovieBird
You're ignoring that Amazon
1) Uses DRM to lock people into their ecosystem
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No. You can buy non-DRM'd books on Amazon. I don't think that Amazon really cares about DRM, since the net result of it being removed would be more customers buying books. Probably from Amazon.
Removing DRM did not undercut iTunes share of the music market at all.
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2) Is cut-throat about keeping prices to the consumer low
OF COURSE they're going to win big with those two caveats. I don't purchase ebooks from Amazon, but I admire the way they have created an outstanding experience, and coupled it with (relatively) reasonable prices.
But the day they get too greedy and raise prices too far, a whippersnapper company will demolish them. The barriers to entry are lower than they've ever been for service companies. It takes less time, and capital, to create a storefront on the internet than at any time in the past.
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This may be true, but I see no reason to believe that Amazon will jack its prices up. Itunes hasn't. Walmart hasn't. Low-price companies are well aware of how easy (or not) it is to enter the market (and also that books face competition from all sources of entertainment, not just books).
To beat Amazon, a company is going to have to do something that Amazon isn't doing (that people want, of course). No one will beat Amazon by trying to be exactly like Amazon, but cheaper.
B&N has done a decent job differentiating themselves from Amazon by leveraging their storefronts. And some small specialty retailers have done okay by focusing on particular niches.
Apple, on the other hand, has had very little success with their e-bookstore because they don't really offer anything any different than Amazon or B&N...in fact, they offer less because you can't read iBooks on anything but an iOS device. And their lack of traction in the book market comes despite the fact that there are something like 300 million iOS devices on the market.