Quote:
Originally Posted by fugazied
The problem is the additional mechanisms which are adversely affecting the ebook marketplace right now. We have things like DRM, platform specific formats (books that can ONLY be read on a Kindle), publishers tied to certain sellers/platforms.
Because of those mechanisms, we get situations where certain books only get sold in a certain way. If the consumer has a certain reader they can only read certain books and so on. They can't simply walk to another bookstore or change reading devices because they might not find the book in the right format elsewhere or DRM has them locked to their device or risk losing their library. We don't have a free market in e-book segment, so who knows where this kind of price fixing will lead.
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This kind of price fixing leads to the very nastiest kind of vendor lock-in, which is one of the biggest problems I have had with the Kindle from the very beginning.
At least Sony added ePub and Adobe DRM reasonably quickly. I dislike DRM intensely, but the addition of ePub at least broke the vendor lock-in on Sony.
Having said that, it's a strange world where Sony can be considered more open than any of their competitors. It also truly damns the Kindle to say the platform provides fewer options than Sony.