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Originally Posted by rhadin
No other ebookstore has the fiscal resources of Amazon. If Amazon had to compete just bookstore to bookstore, a company like Barnes & Noble might have a competitive chance.
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Not so long ago, it was B&N that was the 800 pound gorilla of the book biz, running the traditional small bookstores out of business and terrifying everyone with a proposed merger with Ingram. They had
years of dominance and solid financial advantages with which to compete against Amazon, and they basically flubbed it.
The idea that B&N (and/or Sony, of all companies) is supposed to save us from the perils of a monopoly is quite amusing, given how they spent years trying to dominate the industry, including cranking out their own line of public domain books.
In turn, some upstart could come up with a brilliant idea and blow Amazon out of the water in a few years, at which time you would all complain how Kali Yuga's Ebook Hootch are a bunch of fiends who want to dominate the world of "Direct Brain Book Assimilation."
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Originally Posted by rhadin
The publishers do have a counter if they only had the gumption to do it: All they have to do is refuse to allow any ebookseller to sell any of the publisher's ebooks in any format other than ePub with specific Adobe DRM.
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If Random House can't afford to keep their wares out of the Apple bookstore, there's no way the publishers can afford to execute enough leverage to force Amazon to give up Whispernet and its DRM system.
I'm also slightly amused that people aren't celebrating the alleged demise of the publisher; it is a Monday, after all.
It seems pretty clear to me that retail in the modern age tends to concentrate into a small number of big players, and a large number of bit players.