Ha. Game, set, and match.Originally Posted by Snowy
Ha. Game, set, and match.
Last edited by kged; May 2nd, 2012 at 02:34 PM.
At the moment Amazon is a publisher and is in direct competition with other publishers for writers, as it was at the moment the agency model was implemented.
Which has nothing to do with Apple and the Big 6 breaking the law and screwing consumers. Which is what the DOJ action is about.
Haha ok, but take the rest of my post as a damned fine rally prior to the games end!Ha. Game. set, and match.
I honestly do know where you are coming from, but am afraid for all the tactile loss that the benefits, for me anyway, outweigh the losses.
and that certainly appears to be the direction the market is heading as Amazon sold more ebooks than paperbacks last year.
I don't think p-books will go away, and certainly hope they don't as they have a few advantages and appeal.
Thank you for posting these articles. Very interesting. Especially the first one for me. My daughter is an author. After trying to go the traditional route she has decided to self publish on line. She may not make a lot of money, but at least her work will be out there. And what she wants most is for people to read her stuff and enjoy it.
I have a Nook and I love it. I have bookcases of regular books that I love also. I will always have both, but I do believe that digital is the future. And my children's and grandchildren's generations will not have as big an issue with it as we do. Progress always moves forward, whether we like it or not.
The thing is, if someone sells a product at a loss forever, then there's no problem for the consumer. They just reap the benefit. The fear is that they will drive competitors out of business, and then jack up the prices. But if that happened, it would take about 5 minutes for dozens of small ebook retailers to start up and undercut Amazon's prices.
The only time that can't happen is when the publishers refuse to let retailers set their own prices, and force them all to keep prices artificially high, which is exactly what happened and what the DOJ put a stop to.
Sure, but the charges of collusion (not proven so far) have nothing to do with the agency model in itself, so that is apparently a valid model to sell books. And does not change that Amazon is in competition with the publishers themselves and is rather more anticompetitive than any of them, I am not aware one can buy amazon published works elsewhere.
But of course that monopolistic and monopsonistic behaviour of amazon was not under investigation at this time. Although for me it is a reason to trust them even less than the publishers.
Personally I am more worried about Amazon driving the quality down than the prize up. Since that is what seems to happen usually when large chains have outcompeted the smaller companies.
By the way, I do agree that in the short term driving competitors out of business is a concern. In fact, the first casualty everyone keeps predicting in Barnes and Noble. They were being kept in business largely by the ebook price fixing demanded by the publishers - if Amazon were allowed to undercut them, people predicted they wouldn't be around long because they can't compete.
Enter Microsoft (yesterday) who just bought an 18% stake in B&N. They are hellbent on improving the Nook and crushing Apple and Amazon in the ebook market. And as the XBox proved, competition is a beautiful thing. I'm looking forward to seeing what the money of Microsoft can do for B&N and seeing what products are releaseed by all three companies over the next couple of years.
Yes that recent venture should make it interesting and certainly should quiet those yelling their heads off about an Amazon monopoly.
We've gone way off topic here but what the Hell, it's an interesting diversion. I unsurprisingly reject the frequent descriptions of ebook readers as "progress", and intend to be amongst the last people in the developed world to use one. But I do concede they can be useful. I work in my local Court, and it's becoming more and more common to see solicitors and barristers using them before and during hearings. Each jurisdiction of English Law has a standard reference work, commonly referred to as the White Book, the Red Book, etc - all costing around £500, and all big heavy hardbacks. Add to this the constantly changing nature of the law, which by the end of any given year ends up with multiple updating supplements to be carried around with the main book. So yes, I can understand why the advocates like ebooks, they can be practically useful in such circumstances. So I have no objection to them being used for textbook, reference materials, professional handbooks etc. I believe accountancy students need to buy and use a set of standard works of around 18 volumes! Who wouldn't want a pocket sized alternative to such things? But for fiction, at home, reading for pleasure...never. Never, I say! They are certainly useful, but they are not joyful or beautiful. And they threaten one of life's real pleasures - going into a secondhand bookshop and just losing a whole day browsing. I'll have nothing to do with them for as long as I can.
Well, we'll see if you still feel that way after using it for your law books.
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