Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
It must have been some sort of accident then, that all those new releases went in lockstep to specific price points.
Agency was used as the vehicle for price-fixing. That is why Agency was a bad thing -- because, like you are so fond of pointing out, agency itself is not illegal, conspiracy to fix prices is.
Apple struck a blow to the business strategy of small bookstores. Amazon and B&N did not.
What on earth possesses you to think the #3 ebook store cannot destroy #'s 4-9999 simply because #1 & #2 are bigger than #3? 
That is certainly one possibility, but it doesn't fit all the facts of this particular case.
The small ebookstores were doing fairly well until agency, then suddenly they all failed at more or less the same time. |
When you have 0-10 percent of the market, it's pretty hard to have much of an effect. As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the small ebookstores _weren't_ doing fairly well, they were scrambling for funding. The number one reason that small businesses fail is that they are under funded and don't have the capital to survive when the big boys enter the market.
Here is the basic timeline of the various ebook stores.
fictionwise started in 2000, about the same time that baen books started doing ebooks
Diesel ebooks started around 2004.
BooksOnBoard started in 2006.
Kindle came out in November, 2007
B&N bought Fictionwise in March, 2009
The Nook was announced in Oct, 2009 and opened up in Nov, 2009.
The Apple ebook store was announced in January of 2010 and released in April, 2010.
In the case of the small ebook stores, the biggest issue that most of them had was it was too cumbersome for the average customer (i.e. one who is not computer savy) to get the ebooks from the store onto their reading device. That was possibly the biggest advantage that Amazon has with the kindle.
The most likely explanation is that the small ebook stores that started before the Kindle and Amazon ebook store, had a business plan that allowed them to survive as a little fish in a little pond, but didn't have the resources to maintain their customer base once Amazon, B&N and Apple entered the market. Ebooks went from a niche market, to a major market. It doesn't require a conspiracy theory to explain something that happens all the time.
When my local SF&Mystery bookstore went belly up after Barnes and Noble hit town, I didn't assume that B&N conspired to drive him out of business. I knew that as a small business owner, he was just getting by on a very narrow margin and simply couldn't compete with the economic scale that B&N had.