(1) Monopolistic collusion in e-books; and
(2) Net neutrality
Pray tell who is Amazon colluding with?
> (2) Net neutrality
Amazon doesn't offer last mile internet service as far as I'm aware. Are you alluding to some neutrality violation in their role as ISP for AWS customers or ...?
Sure, just like, any one of the computer manufacturers that Microsoft was pressuring in the 1990s could have just pulled out of selling computers with Windows and rolled their own OS.
> If the rest of the big 6 publishers got on board that would be pretty catastrophic for Amazon
OTOH, if the rest of the big 6 didn't, it would be catastrophic for Hachette.
Setting up an independent ebook sales portal isn't as hard as writing a new operating system and getting it adopted. Not by many orders of magnitude.
You need:
1) A credit card processor. 2) An email server.
That's all.
Adoption is hard for both scenarios.
Getting a user to set up his Kindle to read books from your indy store requires that he enter the Kindle's email address on your site, and your site's email address on the Kindle.
I'm sure some PC vendors like HP could probably have figured out how to put together an OS -- because many of them did. effectively marketing a consumer OS in the market Microsfot had dominated, and where all the app development was focussed on windows, OTOH...
These people (and I am one of them) - only purchase e-books from Amazon. Because it's DRM encumbered, we need to make sure we purchase content from a supplier who is going to be around 10-20 years from now.
Only Amazon (and possibly Apple) has any strong probability of being in that category right now.
This gives Amazon an outsized ability to negotiate with vendors - Amazon is close to being a Monopoly for both the ebook purchasers, and Monopsony for the ebook sellers.
There was a small chance to correct this back when Apple attempted to negotiate agency and MFN rights for their book selling business, but they did it in heavy handed and clumsy way that appeared to the DOJ to be collusion. Some have argued that what Apple did with the book publishers was not that different than what Apple did with the Music publishers - the key difference, of course, is that there was no "Amazon" to complain about their market position being disrupted by a new business model.
I'll still continue to purchase books from Amazon, as distasteful as I find their current negotiating strategy, but I would be (very) happy to see the book publishers decided that DRM encumbered books will ultimately be their downfall because of the negotiating leverage it gives the DRM platform owner.
See: http://stratechery.com/2014/publishers-deal-devil/ for a nice literary analysis of the situation.
Books you buy from Amazon can have DRM or not, depending on the publisher[1].
Books you buy from other stores will work fine on Kindle so long as said other stores aren't using DRM themselves.
Admittedly, if you buy a book in EPUB format from another store you'll have to convert it to one of the formats Kindle supports. Amazon provides a program to do so, and independent stores like Baen[2] tend to give you a choice of formats anyway.
(Kindle not supporting EPUB natively seems pretty blatantly designed to avoid competition, since it's the non-Amazon industry standard at this point. No argument there.)
[1]: http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/01/amazon-quietly-lets-publish...
I wonder how much discussion has gone on with the publishers about eliminating DRM on their content. The music publishers certainly went that way...
One easy way to fight Amazon would be to include a DRM-free digital copy download for free with every physical book purchase. Of course, the scummy publishers won't do that.
For online purchase of books? Not even close to "substantially all of them".
Even so, what barrier do customers have to purchasing at some other online retailer? Where's the insurmountable switching cost?
As for "what barrier," well, consider a website that is visible on Bing but not on Google. Go ahead and tell them "but visitors have no switching cost!" The cost of not being visible where customers are actually looking for you is very high indeed.
Does it constitute a monopoly though? I doubt the folks at Google love Amazon.com but if this became the sufficient to declare Amazon.com a monopoly, then the obvious next step is to immediately declare Google web search a monopoly. With over sixty percent of the eye balls (the last time I read any stats), Google would be in the cross hairs.
I doubt that would be good for anyone.
That isn't a cost to the customer, it's a loss to the supplier. The problem suppliers have is that customers have lots of competition to choose from. A customer might have equal preference for two books that each cost about the same amount and therefore choose the one which is easier to find. That choice makes all the difference in the world to the publisher but negligible difference to the customer.
That's why the customer places such little value on searching for alternatives. Because there is negligible harm to the customer. If there would be customer harm, the customer could instead exercise the option to spend only the few seconds necessary to find the book at another retailer. Unfortunately for the supplier, there isn't, so the customer doesn't.