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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Yes, I remember lots of screaming and hair-pulling over Apple using a proprietary format and DRM for the iTunes store. Apple is a bunch of idiots, I swear.... 
The e-book vendor's goal, by the way, is to tightly control and integrate as much of the user's experience as possible. If you control the reader, the store, and the delivery method, not only do you lock the user into a revenue stream, you also avoid having to deal with potentially unresponsive 3rd party vendors.
It's not a very open plan, and that has its drawbacks; but there is a method to it. |
It reminds me of the search revolution. MSN, Yahoo, Altavista all wanted to be the main hub for the internet giving you news, finance, shopping and everything else in one place thinking that if people can go to MSN for all their solutions they wouldn't bother with going anywhere else and you have consumers locked in. Then some "crazy" guys came around and said hey you know what we're going to focus on search and that's it, that was Google. They eventually crippled the other "portal-type" search engines and most of the other engines ended up using Google to power their searches because they were so far behind. Sure Google eventually had to create gmail and other apps that would lock in customers since all someone would need to do is to create a better search engine than Google's and everyone would leave but they initially pulled all the searchers to their website by building a better product than what was available.
The only way to properly lock in customers is to build a better product. Creating a place where anyone would be able to buy their ebooks from would be a better product than what Sony and Amazon do, instead B&N gives you more of the same. Eventually someone will come in whether its Apple (I doubt it because Apple's history is to lock in customers to their format and devices) or whoever and take the market from these companies and show them how it should actually be done.