comments have interestng thinkers
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If publishers want to keep Amazon from pricing E-Books exclusively, they need to create an open platform in which all E-Books run on all readers, not unlike VCRs and DVD players, or music players. Then they need to find multiple venues to sell them.
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The current publishing model is bloated and inefficient. Collusion to maintain existing market structures is the sort of thing that got Greece and other such countries into trouble when they made public policy decisions to protect the status quo from disruptive innovation. If Amazon becomes a problem then the Justice Department can deal with them at that time, but right now Amazon's only crime is being too good at driving down costs and helping the consumer in the fact of a calcified publishing industry.
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perhaps the day of the paper book is drawing to a close. As it did for buggy whips, horse and carriages and the telegraph. It is the march of progress that the newer and better replaces the traditional, which was much more expensive to produce, ship and handle.
I think of all the trees that are NOT getting cut down for my books. All that ink. All the gas and wear on the roads to ship the books to the distributors and the stores. All the waste, all the raw materials that the e-book has made, or will soon make, unnecessary.
Such is progress. And every time technology has progressed, hordes of people whined about what they were "losing".
Sorry, I don't miss my old scratchy 33 RPM records, nor my 8-track tape, nor my video cassettes and I will not miss my paper books. Not at all.
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What will be our fate as a country when we have no booksellers left? In France the government protects small bookstores by mandating that books cannot be discounted by more than 5 percent. This is not a commodity like oil but an industry that must be maintained and protected -- at this point it may be more akin to an endangered species -- or we will lose what remaining bookstores we have.
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