Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Rather than doing what would help them in the next quarter or year, the publishers were thinking longer-term about what their industry, and literary life, would be like with a single retailer having most of the market.
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It's more likely that they were looking at short-term methods to preserve their hardcover profits at the expense of ebook profits. As long as the top 3 ebook retailers (Amazon, Apple and B&N) sell ebooks in a walled garden of DRM where only their hardware (and their Android/IOS apps) can read their respective books, Amazon is never going to lose its natural monopoly because the average consumer won't switch retailers and lose the ability to read their previously purchased ebooks. If everyone only read their ebooks on Android/IOS tablets, there might be more of a chance for Amazon to lose their monopoly, but only if the other retailers either sold books for less or had stores that were substantially easier to use.