Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
Amazon's predatory pricing is what started the whole thing. Publisher's and other book sellers alike were under assault from Amazon's near infinite access to cash and no need to make profits...buying up marketshare, putting the competition out or keeping them from entering, which was Apple’s case.
Apple wanted to enter the market but was not willing to invest hundreds of millions to enter a product selling goods for a loss...which is what Amazon was doing.
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I think this is somewhat backwards. Apple’s entry to the market with agency pricing eliminated ‘predatory’ pricing of ebooks very quickly; that was never the issue. Imposition of agency came at an unforeseen and mostly unfair cost (losing the lawsuit, a small loss for them) but ebook pricing has not been a factor for some years now, and it was not the decisive factor in Amazon’s early success in capturing market share. I think it was mostly that they had already established themselves as the place to buy books online, and had a large pool of people primed to try out digital reading. Sony, Apple, Mobipocket, Barnes & Noble, Google, Kobo were all starting from scratch to establish a customer base that included heavy readers.
The ‘predatory’ pricing was confined to a few hundred (at most) best-selling titles, for which publishers received full royalties. Everything else was list price. The overall Kindle ebook business was always profitable. $9.99 would have covered most if not all of the royalties paid out. Sales volume was much lower then as well.
Finally, it took almost two years for Apple to deliver iBooks following the launch of App Store, their first real opportunity to enter the market. What evidence we have suggests that Steve Jobs was not convinced it was ready. Probably he was right: reading on 480x320 3.5” screens would be considered torture today, so it waited until iPad to provide some ‘frosting’ on the launch cake, followed by iPhone app a few months later. It was not even bundled with iOS until iOS 8. And there’s the famous ‘people don’t read any more’ Jobs quote (probably he’s been proven right about that as well, or will be some day). This is all by choice, not from some uncompetitive landscape.
If Apple has 10% market share, I would say they are doing very well for their investment. It’s not clear to me that having an Android app, web browser support, etc., would get them much more than that.