[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

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.

Does not explain why they all failed at more or less the same time, after, according to your facts below, a nice 4-10 years of keeping afloat.

And it all hinges on your assumption that they weren't doing fairly well, which you falsely attribute to someone else in an attempt to fool us into ascribing more believability to you.

And FYI, scrambling for funding can be reinterpreted as, doing fairly well but planning to ramp up operations.

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.

They catered to niche readers, like the ones here. Readers who overwhelmingly supported them.

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.

Which doesn't explain why they contentedly earned money through Amazon and B&N's entrance. And then went belly-up as soon as Apple entered.

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.

That does not mean every single small business which fails fails because of that reason. Else there would be no such thing as small businesses.
Must be, that small businesses can usually get by on niche appeal and a small percentage of the market.
But only when they can provide incentive. Which Agency disabled.
Which would be fair and aboveboard, and the nature of the beast/free market economy, except that Agency only happened due to the impetus of a conspiracy.