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Let us not fall into the peasant trap of calling a website, which you need never visit, that sells commodities, which you need never purchase, a monopoly. Amaz
by spir 12y ago
Let us not fall into the peasant trap of calling a website, which you need never visit, that sells commodities, which you need never purchase, a monopoly.
Amazon's strategy is price, convenience and selection. It has been since at least the famous 1997 letter to shareholders.
(Of course, Kindle isn't a monopoly either. None of the pricing is predatory - ie temporarily selling at a loss for anticompetitive purposes. It's razor and blades.)
First World Problems at its finest. "Those fucking starbucks guys have a MONOPOLY on good coffee!!" Suck it up or use widely-available inferior products and services.
- Anderkent 12y agoYou're looking at it from the point of a customer. Sure, if you want to buy a book you could use a different retailer, they probably have the book too. From the point of the producer, if you're not on amazon, you're not reaching 80% of your audience. You don't have a choice.
- WalterBright 12y agoI've bought ebooks from people's own web sites that were not available from Amazon. They did their own promotion, such as posting reddit articles about their books. They reached a worldwide audience, and (presumably) kept 100% of the sales revenue.
- Anderkent 12y agoYou might have. You're hardly representative. If everyone bought books on personal web sites, amazon wouldn't have 80% market penetration.
- nitrogen 12y agoNone of the pricing is predatory - ie temporarily selling at a loss... Actually, this does happen from time to time when Amazon decides to promote a book for free and still pays list price royalties.
- armenarmen 12y agoAccording to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act: "A market share greater than 75 percent indicates monopoly power, a share less than 50 percent does not, and shares between 50 and 75 percent are inconclusive in and of themselves." http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Sherman+Anti-Trust+Act http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Sherman+Anti-T... So by this standard, they are an ebook monopoly, but not necessarily one that would be slapped by the feds, provided that people believe Amazon's large market share wasn't the result of abused or unfair power.