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Originally Posted by kennyc
You are nitpicking and selecting examples. Apple has not won the digital music war nor even the on-line war. Not by a long shot.
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The iTunes music store currently has about 70% of the online music sales market, which in turn adds up to 25% of the overall market (this is US only btw). The next closest competitor is Amazon with 8% of the digital market. We are dealing with an ongoing process, but at least at the moment Apple is clearly dominant in music sales -- despite using a "minority" format (AAC) and, for much of its history, a proprietary DRM scheme (Fairplay).
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Originally Posted by kennyc
...what chance do you think Amazon will have in the ebook world if they do not come around? Very little. Sure they will continue to sell ebooks, but they certainly won't "win."
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If Amazon captures a significant percentage of the ebook sales market -- say, 40% or more -- then I see no reason to doubt that publishers will continue to convert their books to Amazon's format. I can't imagine a publisher will want to stay away from such a huge chunk of customers solely due to the cost of conversion.
Since it's unlikely that Amazon will lose market share simply based on format offerings, I see little reason why everyone else switching to ePub -- especially as long as they have unique DRM wrappers that prevent Sony books being read on the Nook, and vice versa -- will have much of an impact on Amazon.