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“We want to have the best electronic book store, and we want to have the best-built e-reader — not try to use one to thing to advantage the other,” said Bezos.

by koepked 17y ago

“We want to have the best electronic book store, and we want to have the best-built e-reader — not try to use one to thing to advantage the other,” said Bezos. Someone might want to tell Steve Jobs; Apple, um, clearly didn’t get anywhere by tying iTunes to the iPod. Can someone clarify for me, does it sound like Bezos' stance might be that allowing each product to compete in its own market without the advantage of the other will help force it to become a better product? And that ultimately this will be better because each product will have more merit independent of the other? I can't tell if that's what he thinks or if that's what I think he thinks. Either way, I think I like this way of thinking.

callahad 17y ago
Honestly, I feel like Amazon wants to own the e-book market badly enough that they were forced to introduce their own reader. Once competing hardware shows up, I'd put my money on Amazon dropping or scaling back the Kindle to focus on content sales. Especially when you consider their margins. Books on the Kindle store have a publisher-set "suggested price," but Amazon retains the right to sell the item at any price point. For each sale, regardless of actual price, the publisher gets 35% of their suggested price. Imagine publishing an item for $100 on the Kindle store. Amazon can mark it down 25% and still $40 per sale while you only get $35. Not a bad situation for Amazon.
shimon 17y ago
Bezos' claim is bullshit; of course they want to use their reader to advantage their store. Long-term, the book-selling business is probably larger for them than the hardware business. But as long as they have the dominant reader device, of course they are going to leverage that into a position of dominance in ebook sales. He'd love us to believe that the store and reader are not in some sort of mutually-reinforcing dominant position. But if they really were separate, wouldn't I be able to buy e-books from amazon with a different device? And start my own bookshop for kindle users (maybe paying amazon for traffic to the device)?
- mlinsey 17y ago
  But if they really were separate, wouldn't I be able to buy e-books from amazon with a different device? And start my own bookshop for kindle users (maybe paying amazon for traffic to the device)? You can definitely do the former. You can use your PC to buy Kindle books on Amazon and then read them on your iPhone or iPod touch. (You can't buy them directly on the phone, but who knows whether this decision was made by Amazon or by the Apple App Store guardians.) As for the latter, you can probably do that too, albeit in a pretty cumbersome way. Native PDF support on Kindle DX will make it much more viable, although the biggest barrier would be limited access to the Kindle's wireless connection. I suppose one possibility if you were making your own Kindle store would be to have your customers add your site's email address to your Kindle's whitelist of addresses allowed to send documents to your Kindle. This would mean customers would pay an extra $0.15 per MB with each transaction...but now that I think about it this is still way less than Amazon would charge you to sell a book in the Kindle store at Amazon.com....hmmm...I wonder if this may actually be viable?
  - throw_away 17y ago
    actually, with the newest version of the kindle iphone app, you can buy books and have them sent to your iphone OTA. and dave thomas at pragmatic programmers has been targeting kindles for a couple of months now. you pay him for the file and then it's up to you to get it on your kindle (by cable or by email), but I prefer his formatting over what you get with other technical books at the kindle store. he's put a lot of thought into making code examples readable on the device.
- cdibona 17y ago
  Uh, mobipocket.com, the company that sells most of the e-books is owned by.....Amazon. So if you have an iRex or a Cybook, you are shopping at Amazon for books, it just isn't on the amazon.com site.

by koepked 17y ago

callahad 17y ago

Honestly, I feel like Amazon wants to own the e-book market badly enough that they were forced to introduce their own reader. Once competing hardware shows up, I'd put my money on Amazon dropping or scaling back the Kindle to focus on content sales. Especially when you consider their margins. Books on the Kindle store have a publisher-set "suggested price," but Amazon retains the right to sell the item at any price point. For each sale, regardless of actual price, the publisher gets 35% of their suggested price. Imagine publishing an item for $100 on the Kindle store. Amazon can mark it down 25% and still $40 per sale while you only get $35. Not a bad situation for Amazon.

shimon 17y ago

Bezos' claim is bullshit; of course they want to use their reader to advantage their store. Long-term, the book-selling business is probably larger for them than the hardware business. But as long as they have the dominant reader device, of course they are going to leverage that into a position of dominance in ebook sales. He'd love us to believe that the store and reader are not in some sort of mutually-reinforcing dominant position. But if they really were separate, wouldn't I be able to buy e-books from amazon with a different device? And start my own bookshop for kindle users (maybe paying amazon for traffic to the device)?

mlinsey 17y ago
But if they really were separate, wouldn't I be able to buy e-books from amazon with a different device? And start my own bookshop for kindle users (maybe paying amazon for traffic to the device)? You can definitely do the former. You can use your PC to buy Kindle books on Amazon and then read them on your iPhone or iPod touch. (You can't buy them directly on the phone, but who knows whether this decision was made by Amazon or by the Apple App Store guardians.) As for the latter, you can probably do that too, albeit in a pretty cumbersome way. Native PDF support on Kindle DX will make it much more viable, although the biggest barrier would be limited access to the Kindle's wireless connection. I suppose one possibility if you were making your own Kindle store would be to have your customers add your site's email address to your Kindle's whitelist of addresses allowed to send documents to your Kindle. This would mean customers would pay an extra $0.15 per MB with each transaction...but now that I think about it this is still way less than Amazon would charge you to sell a book in the Kindle store at Amazon.com....hmmm...I wonder if this may actually be viable?
- throw_away 17y ago
  actually, with the newest version of the kindle iphone app, you can buy books and have them sent to your iphone OTA. and dave thomas at pragmatic programmers has been targeting kindles for a couple of months now. you pay him for the file and then it's up to you to get it on your kindle (by cable or by email), but I prefer his formatting over what you get with other technical books at the kindle store. he's put a lot of thought into making code examples readable on the device.
cdibona 17y ago
Uh, mobipocket.com, the company that sells most of the e-books is owned by.....Amazon. So if you have an iRex or a Cybook, you are shopping at Amazon for books, it just isn't on the amazon.com site.