Quote:
Originally Posted by zerospinboson
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.
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i don't know if that analogy works. there's so many differences, probably more than there are similarities...
first off, as was already stated by someone else, iTunes and iPods can play many music formats including MP3. the iTunes standard music format is not a proprietary format, its AAC which is basically an audio-only MPEG4 file so you get a higher quality audio file at the same bit-rate when compared to MP3 for example. many devices besides iTunes can play AAC files and you can have an iPod and have tons of legally owned music that was never purchased on the iTunes music store. Steve Jobs was always a proponent of removing DRM and when he finally convinced the entire music industry that this was a good thing to remove DRM from all of iTunes music files, that was a very good thing and it ensures that files purchased there can be played on many other devices besides iPods alone as well as they can be easily converted into other formats.
the kindle is very different in this way in that it does not read many different formats of eBooks and doesn't even read the MP3 version of eBooks, that being ePub. are there any other readers that don't read ePub formatted eBooks? that and you can only read kindle books on kindle readers and kindle software. amazon is of course doing this on purpose and bezos' intentions are obviously very different from steve jobs' when it comes to drm like this.
the number being floated around is that amazon has sold around 3 million kindles, which is a lot, though its really all relative. apples sells millions of ipods each quarter and i think the most recent estimates are that apple has sold more than 160 million ipods to date (although i could be way low on this figure too).
iPods are also much much cheaper than eBook readers and amazon has never dominated the ebook reader market like apple has dominated the mp3 player market for years. so you are correct that amazon doesn't have the pull over eBooks that apple has over music.
again, i think we're all a little too close to everything that is going on and the truth is we don't know exactly how its going to shake out. i really think a wait and see approach is best before sounding too much like chicken little.