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Originally Posted by taustin
If the comparison is meaningless, then Amazon is not, be definition, a monoply controlling the industry to the detriment of the consumer, and this whole discussion is pointless.
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No, you're missing the point - a monopoly does not have to control every single aspect of an 'industry' to be a monopoly; it merely needs to control the part of it in which it is the strongest (and eventually only) member. It's also partly down to how wide the definition of an 'industry' is. A chocolate manufacturer doesn't have to control the entire food industry in order to have an adverse effect on the price of chocolate bars - it merely has to control the chocolate part of it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by taustin
(And this whole discussion is pointless, since the moment that comparison is meaningful, a thousand independent publishers will crop up and start eating in to Amazon's market.)
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Again, you're comparing oranges with apples. For those thousand publishers to be in
direct competition with Amazon, they would have to stock the same products, and in that case, Amazon would win because of its buying power. Where those publishers might win is if they publish books for a niche market that is too small for Amazon to bother with (or, as with the example of Baen above, that has very specific needs). That doesn't mean that Amazon hasn't got a monopoly on book sales - if it controls enough of the market that it can by itself affect the price of the books it does sell, then it's a monopoly.