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Originally Posted by HarryT
Do you have any evidence to support that extraordinary claim?
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Really? We have to debate that again? The wholesale price of a NYT's best seller book was 50%....around $12.50 a book. Amazon sold them for $9.99. That was never a controversial opinion and the Amazon-blinkered folks on this forum repeatedly said "why should the publishers care since they still get their $12.50".
The destruction of the value of a new release book was the very reason the publishers all went to war against Amazon.
All of that changes nothing about the reality that -- in the US, you have zero chance of selling a stand alone ebook reader. There is just too much of a compelling "goodness" to having a nice tie in between the reader and the library.
Therefore, to introduce a book reader in the US is to go into direct competition with Amazon's book dominance. This explains where there is competition elsewhere in the world but not nearly as much here. It's not like we lack for competition in the US in any other electronic space: mobile phones, computers, tv's, and the like.
That's true whether or not you think Amazon is doing anything predatory or wrong.