Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike L
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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no, true, nobody forced me to buy the amazon kindle. i "voluntarily" entered a monopoly, but that doesnt change the fact that its a monopoly. also, that's not the discussion as i understand it: it was in regard to the price of an ebook, not an edevice.
no, there is no law requiring i buy a ebook from amazon, but does there need to be such law for a monopoly? i'm no legal expert on monopoly, just a common consumer, but if there is only one entity that sells a particular product, how is that not a monopoly? could i, for example, open a website where i post downloadable software, such that the kindle can read epub files? no, why? because that would destroy amazon's file format monopoly. if you're right, and theres no monopoly, amazon would be perfectly fine with me doing that. sure, you're right, i could just buy the paperback or throw down another $300-400 for a sony ereader and commence to manually transfer ebooks into the device w/o whispernet, but then doesnt that defeat the purpose of the amazon edevice? wouldnt that be akin to not buying gas for my car anymore, and instead taking a bus (still gets me from point A to point B). i achieve the same result (get to read the book; get from point A to point B), but not the same means of achieving the result (via an amazon edevice; via car), which may or may not be critical to a consumer.
i'm not suggesting this is an amazon-only thing, its obviously a publisher thing too, but without amazon's exclusive file format, none of this would be an issue.