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Old 10-01-2009, 07:41 AM   #13
Mike L
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Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hal_9000 View Post
agreed in general, great remarks, except this is a legal monopoly. goodbye free market and goodbye capitalism.
In what sense is it a monopoly? Is someone forcing you to buy your reader from Amazon, as opposed to Sony or any of the others? And even if you did buy a Kindle, what law says you have to buy your books from the Kindle store?

(I suppose if a particular title was only available as a Kindle e-book, yes, that would be a monopoly. But it's always been the case that publishers have a monopoly on their own titles [subject to subsidiary rights and foreign sales]; that doesn't stop them from competing.)

I also agree with BWaldron that any anger should be directed at the publisher as much as at Amazon. To a large extent, it's the publisher who fixes the price.

But that doesn't make the publisher any more greedy than Amazon. I strongly suspect that the high prices of e-books compared to traditional books is a mixture of fear and ignorance on the publishers' part. Many of them still don't understand the nature of the e-book market, are uncertain about how it wil develop, and - above all - are scared of e-books stealing sales from their mainstream business.
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