Amazon Win

Posted on 10. Feb, 2010 by admin in Articles

Amazon Win “I finally started to make real money. It was not easy job but it paid well. Thanks for the recommendation” (Rose M.)

Amazon now controls 90% of the eBook market, which means it controls most of the eBook market. Now that Apple and others have released their ebook readers. Will Amazon win the eBook war?
The answer seems to be “yes”. Because when most of the ebooks are sold from Amazon, it already has a huge client base. Amazon’s Kindle has rapidly become the de facto ebook format. If Amazon can maintain their share of e-book sale thereby increasing its market share, it will become so widespread that people will only want to buy Kindle.

Currently Amazon encodes its e-books with DRM so that it cannot be tampered nor used with any other e-book reader. Since consumers are oblivious of this, chances are that Amazon may not back away from employing DRM which further increases the chance of making its format so popular that everyone will be using it unknowingly.

If Kindle becomes the standard e-book format, Amazon will be able to leverage on its popularity to woo more book publishers to adopt Kindle which will be more profitable for Amazon. It will also make the format more affordable to the publishers and ultimately the readers.

In a few years, Amazon’s dominance in the e-book hardware market will fade away but Amazon will still control the eBook publishing scene, while its Kindle hardware sales will be almost zero or very small.
Since dozens of e-book readers are introduced at CES, it makes little sense for Amazon to continue its less profitable Kindle hardware business. To counter this Amazon plans to standardize its own format in the e-book industry so that the customers will be forced to use its e-book service while other e-book manufacturers will have to support the Kindle format. Since the adoption of the format is too high, publishers will be forced to do business with Amazon.

Amazon will slowly stop its Kindle business and try to concentrate on the e-book market which only involves less tech support and fewer employees to support the product. While it may lose its Kindle hardware business, Amazon will win the dominance over the electronic book publishing.