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Comment by bborud | Hacker News Reader

What I don’t get is why the publishing industry never got its act together, listened to customers and got its act together.

Yes, like many industries I have worked in I can imagine that they are unable to cooperate because of petty greed and short-sightedness: they would rather have the whole market taken away from them than endure the possibility that some of their direct competitors get a small, temporary advantage.

It should not be hard to create truly interoperable systems that can cut Amazon out of the equation. It isn’t a technology issue. We have technology that easily solves every conceivable aspect of distributing, paying for and consuming ebooks.

This should be the ultimate opportunity for the publishing industry. Especially given that Amazon isn’t investing much in development of devices.

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I'm not very familiar with anti-cartel laws (in any country), but I wonder if there would be legal issues preventing publishing companies from working together in such a way even if they otherwise had wanted to?

(Though even if that is the case, I'd still think they could have at least agreed on open standards to use, to prevent anyone like Amazon from creating vendor lock-in.)

But Amazon had advantages from its size. In terms of economies of scale for device manufacturing, publishers could have somewhat caught up if they pooled money to invest in a co-owned company that made devices (though still wouldn't have had such an advantage as Amazon, who could share R&D and production costs with any overlaps to other devices such as smart home speakers, Android tablets, etc.) But Amazon was also able to take a bigger picture approach, using cheap Kindles/ebooks to attract people into their ecosystem and then converting a not-insignificant amount of them to buying other stuff on Amazon.

Collaboration need not be subversive. In fact, it can be the opposite. As you point to, by using open standards.

Devices are not a real problem. You don’t need scale to get hold of affordable readers in bulk. There’s lots of them available and if the market were to grow, there would be even more devices. Today these devices are not very useful as putting content on them is awkward and fragmented. If that pain went away, there would be a huge market.

I think the problem is that Amazon would retaliate. And the publishing industry are too afraid of challenging them. Because they have never been able to get their act together before.

> I'm not very familiar with anti-cartel laws (in any country), but I wonder if there would be legal issues preventing publishing companies from working together in such a way even if they otherwise had wanted to?

Then all syndication services would have been banned, including Spotify, Netflix, and so on.

There definitely are ways that publishers could have avoided falling foul of anti-Cartel legislation (my question was about where the line is, ie if they did it legally would it actually benefit them), but...

Spotify and Netflix aren't owned or created by a syndicate of all the major publishers, so that's not actually a counter point. There's a huge difference legally speaking between a company negotiating with lots of rights holders to offer customers all of their content in one place, vs. those rights holders co-creating that platform and running it themselves.

(Not that the distributor has to be owned by a cartel of the rights holders to still abuse their position illegally, eg https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/e-book-retailers-d... - it's just that the cartel aspect is the bit I had been talking about.)

Have we really come to a point where the only business structures we can envision are huge monopolies playing zero-sum games?

Imagine if every publisher offered every book to every service that sells it to consumers? And are free to sell their own and other publishers books? They could even include Amazon. Yes, it would require DRM and a bit of software infrastructure, but guess what: they could choose to fund development of an open source system for managing this.

They can do this. But they won’t. They’d rather be beholden to Bezos and not even try.

I’ll repeat myself: they’d rather get collectively screwed than risk that a competitor might get a small advantage.

Slow reply, but: good points!

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