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Comment by gutnor | Hacker News Reader

> On the other hand, it is incredibly easy to go around Amazon.

It is tiring to hear that kind of argument all the time to determine if a business is a monopoly ( monopsonist ) or not and then it is supposed to be business 101 to know that people do not optimize their finance to the last cent and can be hooked into a company by habit or convenience.

What matters is if amazon clients actually do go around Amazon or not and based on what criteria. Google thinks of Amazon as a threat to their ads business because people use Amazon as their search engine for stuff to buy. I would say that a pretty good indication that the original author may have had a point.

> Setting up online stores is not rocket science ( to compete with Amazon )

Sorry but I can't read past that. Beside being insulting for anybody that has tried to put an online business together, can a economy journal be taken seriously when publishing that kind of statement in 2014 ?

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The author does have a point, though. He's not suggesting that the average reader throw up an ecommerce site to compete with Amazon. He's suggesting that Hachette, a 200 year old book publisher, should be able to compete with Amazon, a 20 year old tech company.

It's Hachette's fault that they don't have an eReader to compete with the Kindle, and it's Hachette's fault they don't have a storefront to sell directly to consumers. The writing has been on the wall for almost a decade. Any idiot could tell you that we were moving toward eReaders. A smart company would see the trend and adapt. Nothing stopped Hachette from hiring engineers and making a push into the future, except for their own 200-year-old stubborness.

This is just another case of industry incumbents failing to keep up with moving technology. For others, see MPAA, RIAA, Taxis, etc. I have no sympathy for a company that could have entered the game five years ago, but failed to. Hachette, if anything, was in a better position, from a market/supply chain standpoint, to develop eReaders. They just failed to.

No one wants an eBook reader for each publishing company.

True, but without Amazon we likely would not have any eReaders with much support. Any of the large publishers could have stepped up early on and became the dominant e-reading platform. Instead they have fought e-reading every step of the way. The publishers hate e-reading. IMHO, the complicated rules around DRM and ebooks is proof that publishers want to make it so complicated to read an ebook that people simply give up.

Well we had a bookshop (Barnes & Noble), a tech company (Sony, who did not have any book content), and some pther booksellers, all of whom probably would have shipped without Amazon. But no publishers.

Thats not an argument for Amazon though.

I agree, but lets not paint the publishers as innocent here.

Oh I wouldn't :)

People wouldn't mind an e-book reader or online store from a consortium of publishing companies. At least the retailers are trying: http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/25/7069863/retailers-are-dis...

Excluding Oreilly and other guys like the Pragmatic books, the only thing the publishers try is litigation. Moreover Hachette cares much less about customers than Amazon does.

What I want, and what I bet a lot of people want, is an ereader for all publishers.

The only difference between an ereader and a tablet today is the display and weight. IIRC it's still some form of Android below. Why can't an ereader have different apps for different storefronts? An Amazon app for their books, a Kobo app, maybe even a Hachette app if we wanted. Though it's not perfect, the idea of reading all books from all publishers, fully legally (no need to strip DRM) on a SINGLE device would be awesome.

You don't have to, you can just use your Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email

Sure, there's no DRM available this way (not that the Kindle DRM is very strong anyway), and there'a tiny bit of setup required. There's a danish e-book-shop (riidr.com - Amazon doesn't carry Danish e-books) that uses this mechanism to deliver books to customers, so I should think it works.

Great post. Required reading: The Innovator's Dilemna

> It is tiring to hear that kind of argument all the time to determine if a business is a monopoly ( monopsonist ) or not

Nevertheless, that's the relevant bar to clear. If consumers reasonably have another option, no matter if the use it or not, then there's not a monopoly. At any given time, there will be a "most convenient" or otherwise "default" provider for a given class of product, a sort of "monopoly of convenience", and there will be some stickyness to that provider - but that's stickyness, not monopoly.

Just like the supermarket down the road can't lure you away from your "default choice" supermarket with a 2 cent discount on butter, Amazon's competitors can't lure customers away with minor niche publications - but if Hachette actually choses not to distribute, say, the promised new Harry Potter universe books on Amazon, a very large number of people will break their stickyness to Amazon to read it - and Amazon would do well to heed such a threat.

>> Setting up online stores is not rocket science ( to compete with Amazon )

> Sorry but I can't read past that.

Come on - setting up an on-line store is trivially easy - Amazon can provide services covering you for ordering, payments, fulfillment...

> What matters is if Amazon clients actually do go around Amazon or not.

I disagree. If every freely chooses to buy from Amazon when they could have bought elsewhere, that doesn't mean they have a monopoly. It means they offer a superior product (or a superior price). As soon as someone comes along and offers a better price or product, people will stop buying from Amazon.

Power still lies with the consumer in this case; government regulation is not required.

Setting up an online department store with visions of competing with Amazon in all channels is quite implausible. But setting up an online store to sell your own products is trivial! It's a little harder for someone publisher-scale but you don't even really need smart programmers, just decent ones. :P

But, gaining consumer trust is another matter altogether. I am much more likely to purchase a 'fulfilled by Amazon' product from an unknown entity because I feel I have Amazon's guarantee that I'll be satisfied. When I go to websites for vendors that I know little about, I do not have the same comfort level about delivery, security of my personal information, and guarantees of satisfaction.

But they're not talking about an unknown entity. They're talking about the publisher of the book in question, of which there are about five or six important ones.

Baen has been remarkably successful with their ebook brands.

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