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Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Cheap Reads!
  The kindle software is available for most platforms, while amazon could make it difficult to access it from other devices they actually haven't. Amazon appear to be using the cloud storage as method of keeping customer loyalty, That's only part of it. Back in the 00's, market research I saw for Computer Shopper indicated that 75% of punters who bought a PC through an ad in that magazine never installed any software on it -- the process of buying and installing shrinkwrap software was too intimidating. Today, the curated smartphone app store has broken that barrier -- but buying content...
• Brett Dunbar commented on Cheap Reads!
  Dumping is pretty rare, as genuine dumping is self limiting, allegations of dumping however are fairly common. Amazon ended up with nearly all of the market fairly, Microsoft abandoned it very early and no one else made much effort to enter. As a bookshop Amazon didn't attempt to make money with hardware, selling the kindle at about cost, believing that once someone had a cheap e reader they would eventually start to purchase content....
• Brett Dunbar commented on Cheap Reads!
  Squeezing suppliers into providing their product at a lower cost is not normally a matter of concern to competition authorities. The Restrictive Practices Court is fairly focussed on the interests of consumers practices that raise prices are generally held to be unlawful as contrary to the interests of consumers, practices which lower sales prices are not. Apple's scheme was an attempt to impose retail price management which is generally unlawful, Amazon choosing to discount the price charged to consumers was not....
• arjenkamphuis commented on Cheap Reads!
  If the DRM gets too much there's various options around it. Calibre with plugins make unswindling the Amazon Swindle very easy. Extra karma-points for this analog solution using Lego. The latter also nicely shows why DRM will always fail. eventually the publishers will figure this out. Until such time I will be buying Charlie's books as hardcovers for my bookcase and get the digital version elsewhere....
• slamble commented on Cheap Reads!
  Squeezing suppliers into providing their product at a lower cost is not normally a matter of concern to competition authorities.It is (or should be) when the purchaser is effectively a monopsony, or near to one. There are plenty of examples of suppliers being squeezed by, for example, Walmart to the point where they went out of business, because they couldn't keep up with the never-ending demands for more and more ever-cheaper products. It would not surprise me if that's the sort of direction Bezos was intending to take Amazon's ebook business....