Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
A few "facts" seem inconsistent or maybe I just don't understand:
This "90%" Amazon market share figure thrown about is one. What share did B&N and Sony have? This would make the sales at the many other retailers negligible. Were they profitable? Mr Coker says Smashwords achieved profitability in 2010 after Agency. The others we don't know.
BoB and Diesel both claim that it took over a year (up to 18 months) to re-establish contracts with the Big 5. And there may have been one or two publishers that never returned. What was the holdup? More facts are needed. Amazon, B&N, Sony, Borders, Apple had contracts on day one. Why didn't BoB, Diesel and others at least use a distributor like Overdrive who supplied ebooks to several retailers including Borders? If you know a few months ahead of time that most of your product is disappearing, you better have a contingency plan after pulling 80 hour weeks trying to make deals.
I believe these other stores wouldn't have been able to handle the increased competition of Apple, Google and Kobo who all started in 2010 even without Agency. Frankly, they didn't have significant market share to begin with.
I also believe the newly released $139 Kindle Keyboard, Amazon Publishing and KDP Select also were factors in these other retailer's declines starting in 2010.
|
Another possibility is that the rise of the tablets and ebook apps gave an advantage to ebook stores that had associated apps and methods for easily downloading books into those apps.
In economics, this cycle is called creative destruction. As the market changes, some companies prosper and other companies fall to the way side. The same thing happened to the mall based bookstores when the mega bookstores such as Barnes and Noble took hold. Then when Amazon got going, it was the mega bookstores turn to suffer. In the phone market, Blackberry and Nokia once reigned supreme. But neither could ride the smart phone wave.