Quote:
Originally Posted by ereadingdotcom
I respectfully disagree with you that real competition is not already taking place within the epub space. Amazon's marketshare has actually dropped, even as the overall pie has gotten larger. This is due almost exclusively to the growth of new competition.
As the focus on an ebookstore grows from creating a walled garden to providing value-added products and services, whomever does that will become a serious competitor to ALL of the "Big 3".
As we've been raising funds, the most common question we get is, "How will you take on Amazon." The answer is, we don't have to. The ebook business is exploding and people are looking for a superior alternative to the Big 3. I know, because we hear from those future customers EVERY DAY.
That superior solution just doesn't exist...yet. Once it does, word-of-mouth, media coverage, and that elusive animal, "buzz", will help take care of a great deal of that new company's success.
Put more succinctly, people once said that no one could possibly beat B. Dalton Booksellers. Then they said Waldenbooks would NEVER go out of business. Of course, they said, once those were gone, who could possibly compete with Borders?
Amazon is very, very far from invincible. ePub competitiveness is a big part of why they're feeling the heat, and their annual report numbers show that, too.
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A rising tide does float all boats, and my favorite market to compete in, before I retired and could choose where we concentrated, was a growing one. Life is much easier for all involved. The ebook business overall is still growing very nicely year-over-year.
As far as real competition, has any of this substantially lowered prices for the consumer on an ongoing basis for the basic product? Show us that e-book prices going down year-by-year. That addresses the OP's question.
B&N's (and the Nook part) results were worse than Amazon, and Sony in the same area worse than B&N's. Google can $tay till they win if they choose to, and Apple has huge cash too, and their iFanatics. I expect B&N to struggle to stay in business; I don't know how the B&N-MSoft thing will turn out, which is now more relevant to ebooks; it's not clear what they are doing yet (to me). At least MSoft has $ and technology to help them stay in the business longer.