Thread: Amazon’s Book Monopoly : A Threat to Freedom of Expression?
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Old 02-17-2016, 04:49 PM   #126
dgatwood
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf View Post
You could say Amazon is a monopoly because they are the only ones who sell KF8 and KFX eBooks.
More significantly, you could say that Amazon has:
  • Deliberately used a proprietary format for which non-proprietary equivalents exist.
  • Refused to allow publishers to submit content in those formats unless it was created with Amazon's own tools. (Yes, some people have gotten away with it, but I'm pretty sure that the policies say not to do so.)
  • Included provisions in the terms of use for those tools that make it unlawful for publishers to sell those books in KF8/KFX format through any other site.

The combination of those rules makes Apple's behavior look tame by comparison. At least Apple doesn't require publishers to use iBooks Author....

Effectively, this means that for publishers to publish Kindle books in any other manner other than through Amazon, they must create two entirely different Kindle versions of their books—one produced with KindleGen and one produced with Calibre or some other similar tool. That's a huge amount of overhead for what is likely to be a small market (people who own Kindle devices and are willing to buy books elsewhere), so Amazon's behavior effectively means that nobody bothers to make Kindle books available outside of Amazon.

IMO, from a legal perspective, there's really no question about whether Amazon's behavior is abusive and anticompetitive. The question is whether they're close enough to a monopoly to warrant legal action against them for their abuses. Remember that you don't have to have 100% of any market to be impacted by antitrust laws. I would say that 74% of the eBook market is plenty big enough to qualify.

As for whether it is a threat to freedom of expression, I would say that it is, but only because Amazon has placed themselves in a position where they have the unique ability to seriously limit freedom of expression. This is not to say that they are doing so, nor that they plan to do so, but rather that no company should have that much power to do so, because it only takes one CEO change to seriously screw things up.
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