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Never saw ebook book buying coming? What? In the '90s we were selling books for the Palm Pilot. I remember when a sample of the Rocket showed up at the office.

Never saw ebook book buying coming? What? In the '90s we were selling books for the Palm Pilot. I remember when a sample of the Rocket showed up at the office. We thought, hey, now maybe people will start buying ebooks! I also remember when Amazon first started selling books online, and they were getting their data from Books in Print. Despite the name, BIP lists a lot of books that are not in print. Some effort was required to get them to clean up their data. In those days, B&N was rapidly expanding their superstore system, and trying to drive out the independents by, you know, discounting. And we said, hey, once they've gotten rid of the competition, those discounts will go away. And they did.

smacktoward 9y ago
Not to mention that B&N went in big on ebooks. B&N's Nook platform was the only competitor comparable to Amazon's Kindle ecosystem. It didn't work out, of course, but that's something very different than missing the coming tide of ebooks altogether. > Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon One of the points of the article is that they can't*, because Amazon has other lines of business and B&N does not. So Amazon can use the revenue from those other businesses to swallow losses on book sales in order to drive out competition.
- chx 9y ago
  I am just a single data point but still I have a story to tell: I had a B&N Nook. Then I didn't and I still was buying Nook eBooks. You know why? Because DRM was a fig leaf. They had their DRM solution which was so easy to strip it's not even funny -- they encrypted your books with a key based on your name and credit card number (this might've originated with ereader.com). Then in 2015 March they changed algorithms and it was not so easy any more and I walked.
ghaff 9y ago
Yeah, it like how Kodak "never saw digital coming." Actually they had PhotoCD long before digital cameras were a widespread thing. You can recognize a shift to electrons and still not figure out a way to make a large chain B&M business work. Smaller scale, but one of the first larger bookstores around me to discount books on a consistent basis effectively helped drive a lot of the smaller bookstores that had been around forever out of business. Ten or twenty years later, they were complaining online when they were effectively driven out of business by Amazon.
- Finnucane 9y ago
  But, rather infamously, a Kodak engineer cobbled together a rudimentary digital camera out of parts lying about in the lab, c. 1975, showed it to management, and they were like, who would want that.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Oh, Kodak did plenty of things wrong. But the technology wasn't really there for a mass market digital camera for almost 25 years after that. And replacing a consumables business that was so big Kodak owned their own chemical company at one point was going to be difficult in any case. Fujifilm transitioned much better but they were much smaller and also had their own struggles.

smacktoward 9y ago

Not to mention that B&N went in big on ebooks. B&N's Nook platform was the only competitor comparable to Amazon's Kindle ecosystem. It didn't work out, of course, but that's something very different than missing the coming tide of ebooks altogether. > Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon One of the points of the article is that they can't*, because Amazon has other lines of business and B&N does not. So Amazon can use the revenue from those other businesses to swallow losses on book sales in order to drive out competition.

chx 9y ago
I am just a single data point but still I have a story to tell: I had a B&N Nook. Then I didn't and I still was buying Nook eBooks. You know why? Because DRM was a fig leaf. They had their DRM solution which was so easy to strip it's not even funny -- they encrypted your books with a key based on your name and credit card number (this might've originated with ereader.com). Then in 2015 March they changed algorithms and it was not so easy any more and I walked.

ghaff 9y ago

Yeah, it like how Kodak "never saw digital coming." Actually they had PhotoCD long before digital cameras were a widespread thing. You can recognize a shift to electrons and still not figure out a way to make a large chain B&M business work. Smaller scale, but one of the first larger bookstores around me to discount books on a consistent basis effectively helped drive a lot of the smaller bookstores that had been around forever out of business. Ten or twenty years later, they were complaining online when they were effectively driven out of business by Amazon.

Finnucane 9y ago
But, rather infamously, a Kodak engineer cobbled together a rudimentary digital camera out of parts lying about in the lab, c. 1975, showed it to management, and they were like, who would want that.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Oh, Kodak did plenty of things wrong. But the technology wasn't really there for a mass market digital camera for almost 25 years after that. And replacing a consumables business that was so big Kodak owned their own chemical company at one point was going to be difficult in any case. Fujifilm transitioned much better but they were much smaller and also had their own struggles.