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Originally Posted by Sydney's Mom
I understand not wanting Amazon to control the ebook market - how has that worked out for music and Apple? Why is it okay for Jobs but not for Bezos? Or is it that they saw what happened to music, and its cash cow the album sale, and they don't want the same thing to happen to the hardback?
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Ipods make up a very sizeable percentage of the digital music player market, and could only play tracks sold through the ITMS. Basically, iTunes is a Very Important Store, which, until well after that pricing show-downshow-down, was the only serious store selling digital audio tracks
in numbers worth mentioning. By 2006, they had sold at least 1 billion audio tracks, and while single tracks are definitely cheaper than books, this is still quite a bit.
Amazon doesn't say how many units they've sold (although they might have told MacMillan privately), but the market here is far smaller, so that they don't even have a quarter of the position Jobs had when he was strongarming the music industry. (Also, I imagine the publishers noticed it when Jobs did so, and wanted to prevent history from repeating itself.) While Amazon might have Kindle users similarly locked in, they can't really tout sales of millions of reading devices per month to show that their customer base is enormous and growing, so they lost.