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Originally Posted by fjtorres
Absolutely.
But how is it Amazon's fault that they've been blessed with inept opponents?
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Oh it's not Amazon's fault. I honestly don't think it's even the other stores fault, like B&N or Smashwords. Amazon's dominance is because they've done most things absolutely right. The major publishers are really the ones that have done the most damage to the eBook market and helped create Amazon's dominance by short-sighted policies that do everything to protect their legacy business and not enough to develop the burgeoning eBook market.
The big pubs lost the plot. Restrictive DRM, price-fixing, focusing only on their best sellers and ignoring mid-list authors in their marketing has all contributed to the rise of Amazon and the proliferation of indie publishing as a viable alternative.
Quote:
Originally Posted by calvin-c
Unless Amazon has contracts requiring they be the exclusive seller of books. If they start doing that then they could corner the market but AFAIK they don't. (Another caveat might be if Amazon were to cut their own throat by making Kindles incapable of displaying ebooks without DRM. That might lock people into Amazon but I seriously, seriously, doubt that will happen.)
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Actually, for those authors who use Amazon's Kindle Desktop Publishing service, they ARE offering a Kindle-exclusive option, KDP Select. You cannot sell the book anywhere but Amazon for 90 days, and you must sell it for $2.99 or higher. In exchange, they give the author a few more promotional tools (like free promotion windows) as well as "library lending" which lets Amazon Prime members check out the book for free - the author gets paid out of a pool of money Amazon sets aside for the program each month so that even if the reader got it for free, the author still gets paid. Thankfully it is optional and I've decided against it. It's good business for Amazon but I don't want my non-Kindle readers to feel left out.
Amazon has actually done a good job with DRM. They allow the author to choose whether to put DRM on their books or not. I'm not saying Amazon is evil, just that I'm uncomfortable with one vendor having so much dominance. Not because I think they WILL use it for ill, but that they can.