Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
You can try to blame agency pricing for walled-gardens, but the truth is it's Amazon's natural business model. They learned from Apple who were able to monetize online-audio by erecting a walled-garden and tying it to a popular and exclusive hardware platform, just like Amazon. Amazon has never shown the slightest inclination to an open system.
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Their market share dropped 45% from 2009 to early 2010. Then Agency and near-cost ereader pricing came in and the smaller Adept stores were squeezed out. (A matter currently in court. What is being litigated is the extent of the damage, not that the damage happened.)
Without viable alternatives to the walled gardens, interoperable epub faded into near irrelevance and without interoperable epub the generic readers faded.
Pretty straight line and fully documented causality chain.
Price fixing favors the large entrenched players and that is exactly what Agency did. Under Agency Amazon rebounded from 54% of a small but growing market to 67% of a much bigger market. It stayed thereabouts until Agency part Deux and now it is growing again.
With enemies like those they hardly need friends.