Quote:
Originally Posted by PortaDiFerro
Only thing I find disturbing with this Amazon "predatory pricing" is that because they have their own closed system, as long as they can lure in lot of people to buy kindle and get some books there, they are unlikely to move away again or at least they'd have to keep their old kindle if they want to read their books still. And at that point they can increase prices when they know their customers can't shop anywhere else.
If the playing field was open (ie. no DRM) it should be relatively easy and cheap to start new ebook store. You don't need to invest in huge piles of books and storage and logistics etc, just make contracts with the publishers. So there would always be new competition once the pricing settles to acceptable rate.
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Work *is* being done to allow for DRM-removal. Thus, purchasers can always move purchased titles to other devices, although this may well be illegal in many countries.
And Amazon's DTP allows for publishers/authors to choose the price for their Kindle ebooks.
And given that the Kindle has been hacked and re-hacked, if one wants to move away from the .azw/.azw1 ebook formats, one only needs to install Ubuntu and a Linux ebook reader on the device. I understand this is actually rather easy on the Kindle DX.
That means the threat of raising prices is invalidated.
Plus, given that the Kindle loves the plain .mobi as well as the .azw ebook format, there is no reason why an owner cannot buy .mobi ebooks from a third-party retailer. I routinely transfer my FictionWise .mobi ebooks to my Kindle. After all, I purchased them while I was a dedicated Bookeen Cybook Gen3 user and now that I have the Kindle, I see no reason to re-purchase them when all I have to do is strip the DRM and upload them.
Derek