Quote:
Originally Posted by boswd
but I do disagree with on some selling points, especially ePub. It's puts the company in a tough spot because naturally you want to sell ebooks out of your own store but there are alot of kindle owners that are shocked to learn that you can check out books from the library and many have said, at least the ones I know, if they only knew before hand they would have bought something else, like the nook or sony.
So actually I think they need to pump up this feature.
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Maybe. Maybe not.
Yes, they are losing customers to the ADE horde because of library books.
But, let's face it, Kindle is first and foremost a book-selling machine.
The revenue from library-focused customers would be limited to the upfront hardware revenue rather than the ongoing revenue stream from book *buyers*. And one reason Kindle WiFi is so cheap is Amazon is willing to sell it at a minimal markup. (They probably are breaking even---at best---on the ones sold in B&M outlets.) If they were paying Adobe's DRM tax they might lose money or have to run a higher price.
One thing Amazon does *right* is that they *don't* try to capture every last customer. They have a target customer and they go after that customer with a (polite) vengeance. Other customers they carefully "neglect". In rare ocassions they have actually told people they are not welcome to shop with them, you know. (It's not personal. It's business.
)
One of the dirty secrets of retailing (and Amazon is primarily a dry goods retailer at heart) is that some customers cost more to "satisfy" than they generate in revenue. Whenever possible, smart retailers steer those customers to their competitors. It's called cherry-picking. It's not something any executive will admit to in public but in private they are happy to see these "occasional" buyers go to somebody like Sony who is then *forced* to subsist almost exclusively on hardware profits and is thus unable to compete with Kindle's pricing.
Microsoft did it to Palm for years; Palm was so focused on maintaining their massive market share they designed their products to maintain the lowest possible price whereas MS designed PocketPCs to satisfy the needs of corporate users and they and their partners were quite happy with a smaller share of the market because they were making decent profits off the product line while Palm was bleeding to death.
(An aside: 80% of my commercial ebooks come from Webscriptions (Baen and Nightshade) and the rest from non-agency Kindle publishers. (I'm boycotting the Price Fix Five since last April and not missing them.) So I'm hardly their preferred Kindle customer. But I fully understand what they're doing and why and if I were an Amazon stockholder (alas, I'm not) I would be pleased with Bezos.)
If library ebook access is important to you then go with a reader that offers that feature. Or get an Android webpad and run the Overdrive app side-by-side with Kindle and FBReader/Coolreader/Aldiko/whatever. Amazon won't mind; they are actively pushing K4A onto Android hardware wherever they can. But the business model for Kindle is going to remain as is as long as it keeps on working.
This is one case where "doing what you always did" is going to continue as long as they like "getting what you always got".
They like being where they are, which is one reason why they brag.