As Competition Wanes, Amazon Cuts Back Discounts (trims free lunch)

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Of course at this point in time it would be seen by many as a hostile move

This.

The ADEPT ebook market is pretty small at this point and the back-end cost to duplicate most of the Kindle ebookstore, feeding the titles through Adobe, is likely to outweigh gains from reaching out to it (especially since it is populated by people who already chose *not* to buy Kindle) and would likely be seen by the trustbusters as an attempt to squeeze the weakest competitors out of the US market.

With all the FUD flying around Amazon is not about to invite more federal attention. The danger far outweighs the income to be gained.

Amazon's interests are served just fine with the current balance of power, especially if Apple keeps taking market share from the other epub vendors. A fragmented epub makes for excellent antitrust insurance.

[Crowl]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I personally hate it when people refer to my Sony as a kindle or any other tablet as an iPad. But then I hate it when people say they are on the computer or on the internet when they are obviously on a chair using the computer or accessing the internet and I really hate it when people use the word gift as a verb.

Very curmudgeonly of me so I generally keep it to myself

I would suspect that plenty us have our own linguistic pet hates too, one that always bugs me is the way that medal has been converted into a verb.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

This.

The ADEPT ebook market is pretty small at this point and the back-end cost to duplicate most of the Kindle ebookstore, feeding the titles through Adobe, is likely to outweigh gains from reaching out to it (especially since it is populated by people who already chose *not* to buy Kindle) and would likely be seen by the trustbusters as an attempt to squeeze the weakest competitors out of the US market.

With all the FUD flying around Amazon is not about to invite more federal attention. The danger far outweighs the income to be gained.

Amazon's interests are served just fine with the current balance of power, especially if Apple keeps taking market share from the other epub vendors. A fragmented epub makes for excellent antitrust insurance.

I do not think that choosing not to buy kindle is as prevalent as you suggest. I would have chosen to buy a kindle DX if the choice was available to me in addition to my original Sony PRS 600 because of the larger screen and the fact that it looked whiter to me but I couldn't without jumping through a lot of hoops. Some people look on Amazon as the devil along with Walmart and Apple and Microsoft etc. Me, I think Revenue Canada is the devil, but I still deal with them like it or not.

And I cannot think that legally Amazon is any more at risk for selling epubs than for selling more than one brand or type of any product. Sure it is a little more grist for the mills of the witch hunters, but will it really make a difference? I think most minds are already made up.

How the trustbusters perceive it and what they can do about it are two entirely different things.

I think the real reason Amazon developed their own proprietary formats was to prevent others from selling books that could be viewed on kindle readers. This is overall a sound business decision, but selling epubs would not affect this very much IMO.

I still contend that accessibility, affordability, advertising and reasonable customer service have made Amazon a success and that were already hugely successful when they were just selling mobi.

Helen

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I think the real reason Amazon developed their own proprietary formats was to prevent others from selling books that could be viewed on kindle readers. This is overall a sound business decision, but selling epubs would not affect this very much IMO.

Helen

Pardon the snippage.

I really think format control is more of a factor than locking out the competition. If all they wanted to do was make it impossible for the Kindle to read books from other sellers, all they needed to do was limit it to DRM-infected books and it would be done.

The big advantage of format control is the ability to introduce the features they want when they want them. With a standards-based format they have to wait for the committee to approve features.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I think the real reason Amazon developed their own proprietary formats was to prevent others from selling books that could be viewed on kindle readers.

But they don't prevent that. Dozens of small publishers who don't insist on DRM are happy to sell you a Mobi file directly that will work just fine on a Kindle.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Pardon the snippage.

I really think format control is more of a factor than locking out the competition. If all they wanted to do was make it impossible for the Kindle to read books from other sellers, all they needed to do was limit it to DRM-infected books and it would be done.

The big advantage of format control is the ability to introduce the features they want when they want them. With a standards-based format they have to wait for the committee to approve features.

No problem with the snippage.

I really can't totally agree on this one. Sure they can add their own features to their own format, but are there that many crucial features missing from the epub format and some of these 'features' can be added on the reader to existing epubs. Like the chapter numbers instead of page numbers that Kobo is so enamoured of. Or their reading life.

Not saying I know every feature out there and some I might consider indispensable if I had them. Perhaps you can point out a few really important ones that are strictly file format based and have nothing to do with the ereader being used and are totally undoable with epub?

And what happens if someone adds a feature not supported by the committee. Are they chastised and locked in the basement for a week? Are there thousands of books unpublished because the author or publisher is waiting for the epub 3 standard?

I understand Apple and Amazon enforcing strict standards on the books format but unfortunately Amazon at least does not enforce the same strict standards on the book being adequately proofread or in some instances being the legal property of the seller. Apple may do better in this regard.

I still think it is mostly about control and not very much about making the book full of features.

Helen

[sjkramer]

I haven't read this entire thread, so pardon me if this has been covered. I happen to know (from personal experience as a publisher) that Amazon regularly sells ebooks at a loss, at least on certain deals. This may be coming to an end, but it was true for some time.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by sjkramer

I haven't read this entire thread, so pardon me if this has been covered. I happen to know (from personal experience as a publisher) that Amazon regularly sells ebooks at a loss, at least on certain deals. This may be coming to an end, but it was true for some time.

It's been discussed, and discussed, and discussed. No one argues that they don't sell some ebooks at a loss.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

[le snip]
I think the real reason Amazon developed their own proprietary formats was to prevent others from selling books that could be viewed on kindle readers. This is overall a sound business decision, but selling epubs would not affect this very much IMO.

Remember, at the time that Amazon developed its format, epub didn't exist yet. Sony was still using LRF, and you could still buy books in MS's .lit format. Sony converted from LRF to epub about a year (or two?) after the kindle came out, IIRC.

I don't think that Amazon will convert to epub because it would be somewhat expensive to convert all of their books to epub, with, presumably, little real advantage to them. (Keep in mind that Sony didn't have a bookstore originally).

I also don't think that there would be much advantage to regular readers if Amazon converted, since I don't think that there's any chance in [insert hot place] that they would use adobe's drm. Amazon is a high volume, low margin business, and even paying 22c per DRM'd book would be a meaningful hit to their profit on many books. Moreover, this would mean giving adobe significant power over Amazon's products, which no company would like to do - this is probably why Apple went with its own DRM.

So essentially, you would end up with a market having all epub, but three incompatible forms of DRM, which might be worse than the current situation.

Finally, I think epub vs. mobi is not like Beta vs. VHS. It's trivial to convert from one (non-DRM'd) format to another - trivial for sellers and trivial for purchasers. I think it's more like .mp3 vs. .aa4 (or whatever format itunes uses) - switching between these formats is not a big deal.

[Synamon]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Finally, I think epub vs. mobi is not like Beta vs. VHS. It's trivial to convert from one (non-DRM'd) format to another - trivial for sellers and trivial for purchasers. I think it's more like .mp3 vs. .aa4 (or whatever format itunes uses) - switching between these formats is not a big deal.

And converting isn't even necessary for most users, with tablets and phones you just load the various apps and read both formats. The comparison with VHS vs. Beta doesn't apply in this digital computer age.

[NightGeometry]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

...I really hate it when people use the word gift as a verb.

The OED tells me:

gift, v.
a. trans. To endow or furnish with gifts (see chiefly gift n.1 6); to endow, invest, or present with as a gift.
15.. Wife in Morel's Skin C j b, The friendes that were together met He [printed Be] gyfted them richely with right good speede.
1621 R. Sanderson 12 Serm. (1637) 396 If God have not gifted us for it, he hath not called us to it.

etc

So the OED thinks it has been in use as a verb since the 16th C.

(Sorry for being picky, I also hate the use of gift as a verb, and I had assumed it was a modern usage, so I looked it up)

[ottdmk]

The format control isn't really to keep other books off the kindle... it's to keep you in the kindle ecosystem. Thanks to Amazon implementing its own format, with its own DRM, you can't move your library away from Amazon. Making it more likely you'll stick with them. (Yes, I know there are ways to "rescue" your library from Amazon. But the general public will never bother with them.)

So yeah, you can read your books in the kindle app on any tablet or phone... but you're still in kindle space. Making it likely that the next book you get will be a kindle edition. Which makes it that much harder to move away from kindle...

I prefer Kobo's way of doing things. Sure, I use kepubs when I buy from kobo. But I can download the ADE (or, sometimes, non-DRM) epub version and use a Sony if I want. Or some other reader entirely. Without jumping through technically illegal hoops.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by sjkramer

I haven't read this entire thread, so pardon me if this has been covered. I happen to know (from personal experience as a publisher) that Amazon regularly sells ebooks at a loss, at least on certain deals. This may be coming to an end, but it was true for some time.

It's been discussed.
We've moved past.

Read this to get up to speed:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...e-fixing.shtml

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Remember, at the time that Amazon developed its format, epub didn't exist yet. Sony was still using LRF, and you could still buy books in MS's .lit format. Sony converted from LRF to epub about a year (or two?) after the kindle came out, IIRC.

ePub was introduced a month or so before Kindle shipped but wasn't usable until august 2008. And it had "teething pains" for another year-plus, at which point the Kindle 2 was going like gangbusters. It was too late for Amazon to retool even if they wanted and they had no reason to want to.

Sony, on the other hand, announced their support early in 2008 but offered no details on how they'd manage the transition for 6 months, effectively Osbourne-ing their reader line until they finally announced in July that they would offer updated firmware for the 505 in August:
http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleV...83259&rel_no=1

Their ebookstore transition took months after that so just as Kindle was launching and establishing Whispernet and their ebookstore, Sony was tied up rebooting their ereader business. And then they introduced the PRS-700 in october.

They lost a whole year+.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by NightGeometry

The OED tells me:

gift, v.
a. trans. To endow or furnish with gifts (see chiefly gift n.1 6); to endow, invest, or present with as a gift.
15.. Wife in Morel's Skin C j b, The friendes that were together met He [printed Be] gyfted them richely with right good speede.
1621 R. Sanderson 12 Serm. (1637) 396 If God have not gifted us for it, he hath not called us to it.

etc

So the OED thinks it has been in use as a verb since the 16th C.

(Sorry for being picky, I also hate the use of gift as a verb, and I had assumed it was a modern usage, so I looked it up)

I too looked it up and did not find this. Your looking is better than mine. Still hate it, but obviously my problem


Helen