Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
No-one was serious competition on paper books online or eBooks (in English) by the time Apple launched iBooks.
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So much good stuff in your post. Too little time to give every point justice.
You are correct that no one was competition to Amazon. Ergo, it was a good thing for Apple to come into the space. And no, Apple was never going to seriously unseat Amazon. But - Apple would have been a viable contender and a bulwark to give publishers some power in their negotiations with Amazon.
The publishers did not have the power individually to combat Amazon's "$9.99 for the entire NYT best seller's list". Amazon was setting in people's minds that a new book was only worth $10. The most profitable books that pay for pretty much the rest of the books that get published.
That is the shot heard 'round the world.
Apple wasn't interested in competing in a loss leader contest. That's not their business model. It was a good conjoining of interests...but they lost in court.
If anybody thinks the little guys would have continued to compete against Amazon on price. You are kidding yourselves. They were only able to discount against books that Amazon didn't care to dominate. It was just a matter of time before Amazon would have started pricing those book sellers out of the market. They didn't have to at first. At first, they needed a way to get people to pay $400 for a kindle to establish the ebook device market. They way they accomplished that was to sell books at $9.99 that people had been paying $25/$30 new as hard backs.
No, none of you that were never paying that kind of money mattered.
Of course you like $9.99 for a brand new book verses having to wait until the mass market paper back came out. Liked it so much that you paid $400 for a Kindle eInk device.
By the time the publishers did something about it - the NEED for a $400 device was gone. Now Amazon was able to sell a $100ish device and couldn't care less that it allowed the publishers to set their own prices. The capturing of the market had already occurred.
And Amazon went on to the next part of their plan and became a publisher themselves.
The little boutique booksellers were never going to last. Scale is everything. Sure, niche players like Baen could still ply their trade. But mass book selling? That was always going to go to one or a couple of the biggest players.