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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
See, we're not really that far apart in our thinking when it boils down to it... except maybe semantically. Because I agree with your above statement. I just don't think "never thought it would take off the way that it has" means the same thing as "couldn't possibly foresee it." Which is what stonetools (by way of Shatzkin) is asking me to believe. They're asking me to believe that the people wanting to sell ebooks saw a market that publishers couldn't possibly see. Nope. Sorry. They simply wrote off ebooks as a non-factor. Which is fine... but guessing wrong doesn't absolve you of anything... it's your industry. You were supposed to be on top of it and guess right. Others did after all.
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Shatzkin's point is that the course of ebook expansion were driven by moves in a totally different business-the tech industry- that they could not have foreseen and had to react to.
The big one is the introduction of the Kindle. Jeff Bezos introduction of the Kindle was not seen at the time as an obvious move-it was seen , rightly, as an enormous and costly gamble and Bezos is rightly regarded as a business genius for concieving it and carrying it off.
Others (BN and Kobo) would follow.
Another important milestone was the introduction of the iPhone and later, the iPad. Who foresaw the rise of iOS as an important ereading platform? Not Steve Jobs-another bonafide business genius-who initially dismissed ebooks as unimportant. It was third party developers who saw that iPhone and other smartphone owners would want to read ebooks on a device that was always with them, and they prompted Amazon, who originally was uninintersted in developing smartphone apps, into introducing iOS and Andriod apps, with other bookstores soon following Amazon. Steve Jobs realized his mistake and decided to make a bookstore part of his new offering, the iPad, presenting the publishers with an opportunity and a problem-he wanted the agency distribution model. And here we are.
Now could the publishers have foreseen all of this? I don't see how. Nobody else did.Could they have reacted better? That we can argue.