Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
A deal is a deal, no doubt. But a single seller of ebooks isn’t healthy. We should want those little boutique websites AND Amazon deal watching sites. I guess I’m trying to point out that Apple and the Big 5 lost....but WE didn’t win.
Amazon won. Amazon was already winning which is why the Big 5 teamed up with Apple in the first place. Collusion is bad...and I’m not in favor of price fixing, I’m just pointing out that things didn’t go back to the way they were before. Little guys were wiped out...Amazon no longer sells the NYT best sellers for $9.99
Apple never even mentions books anymore unless it’s for education.
Today's ebook buying landscape is worse than it was 10 years ago and there is zero movement that I can see to change this
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Apple just did a major revision of their ebook reader and store less than a year ago. If you buy any ebooks from them, then you will start getting emails from Apple about books.
Certainly, it would be great if there were more ebook stores and more buying options. On the other hand, I don't really see any business rational for discount ebooks stores. It's not like publishers are trying to dump books to clean out their warehouses. There is no real cost to maintaining ebooks on one servers.
With that said, there are three major barriers to new bookstores.
The primary issue is that the majority of ebook customers just want the easiest method for buying books. If you have a kindle eReader, you will buy from the Kindle store, if you just have an iPad, you probably buy from the Apple store, if you have a Nook, the B&N store and if you have a Kobo, then the kobo store. Most buy only a handful of books a year and saving a couple of bucks isn't really a thing. Unless a book automatically shows up on your Kindle (or whatever), odds are most customers won't go to that store.
Let's be honest, the posters here are not average ebook customers and likely are not the primary customers for most ebook stores.
Second is selection. Kindle has by far the biggest selection. The publishers really need to make it easy for a new start up to have a full catalog rather than have to negotiate contracts with everyone and their brother. Of course, if they did that, they would be sued into oblivion by a legion of lawyers egged on by Amazon.
Last is publicity. If a company can get the first two fixed, then they have to get consumers to notice them. But that's standard marketing.