Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
This.
The ADEPT ebook market is pretty small at this point and the back-end cost to duplicate most of the Kindle ebookstore, feeding the titles through Adobe, is likely to outweigh gains from reaching out to it (especially since it is populated by people who already chose *not* to buy Kindle) and would likely be seen by the trustbusters as an attempt to squeeze the weakest competitors out of the US market.
With all the FUD flying around Amazon is not about to invite more federal attention. The danger far outweighs the income to be gained.
Amazon's interests are served just fine with the current balance of power, especially if Apple keeps taking market share from the other epub vendors. A fragmented epub makes for excellent antitrust insurance.  |
I do not think that choosing not to buy kindle is as prevalent as you suggest. I would have chosen to buy a kindle DX if the choice was available to me in addition to my original Sony PRS 600 because of the larger screen and the fact that it looked whiter to me but I couldn't without jumping through a lot of hoops. Some people look on Amazon as the devil along with Walmart and Apple and Microsoft etc. Me, I think Revenue Canada is the devil, but I still deal with them like it or not.
And I cannot think that legally Amazon is any more at risk for selling epubs than for selling more than one brand or type of any product. Sure it is a little more grist for the mills of the witch hunters, but will it really make a difference? I think most minds are already made up.
How the trustbusters perceive it and what they can do about it are two entirely different things.
I think the real reason Amazon developed their own proprietary formats was to prevent others from selling books that could be viewed on kindle readers. This is overall a sound business decision, but selling epubs would not affect this very much IMO.
I still contend that accessibility, affordability, advertising and reasonable customer service have made Amazon a success and that were already hugely successful when they were just selling mobi.
Helen