Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
That's just business. Money talks, as they say. I'm sure Amazon made eInk a great offer to get exclusivity of Carta. In the USA, AT&T cut a deal with Apple wherein they had the only iPhone service plans when they were originally released. That pi$$ed off a lot of people who had 2-year contracts with other carriers! As for the other carriers, they should have bid higher.
EDIT: I'm sure it helped that Amazon is the biggest buyer of eInk screens. I suspect Amazon buys more screens than all the other manufacturers combined.
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I haven't seen recent numbers but the last I saw for 2011 had amazon with nearly 70% share of eink's screen capacity.
And there have been reports Amazon helped fund Pearl manufacturing which is why, back in 2010 they were the only vendor with ample Pearl screen supplies: they had first claim on production. It thus makes sense that this time around they asked for and received an outright exclusivity window to carry them through the holidays, at least. After all, with Nook clearly cutting back on volume--if they even do a new eink reader--nobody comes even close to matching Kindle sales volume.