Quote:
Originally Posted by Alisa
Yes. Of course, no one else would have come along and sold books cheaply on the internet if Amazon hadn't been so uniquely evil.  |
I have some sympathy for them with regards to Amazon. It's the same as the malls and hypermarkets making it impossible for the small local shop to compete. You can't just roll your eyes and suggest (as others have done) that all they needed to do was 'behave like Amazon'.
There is a huge change going on in how we consume our media - and whilst we benefit from artificially low book prices, we suffer from a reduction of the ecosystem, at least in the short term.
In their case they may have had years during which their existing business model both paid their wages and allowed them to run the sort of business that they enjoyed. Now that business model is failing, expecting them to enthusiastically jump into an entirely different model of which they have no experience and little evidence of useful profit to be had is optimistic.
The people in the ebook business right now are pioneers. You have to applaud and support their pioneering spirit as the market matures. But you also have to accept that not everyone is a pioneer.