Eric Hoefler's List: Writing

• To truly open the market to competition in e-book distribution, publishers must disrupt the proprietary lock-in of the Kindle ecosystem

  • The question is, how to do this when the market is clearly dominated by the Kindle ecosystem. Will require publisher push.
• Once users are confident in the stability of their libraries, they will buy more e-books. The present situation is one where many users are hesitant to invest in libraries that may suddenly (and inexplicably) vanish, or be preempted by another distributor (remember Sony? Borders?) requiring repurchase of all those e-books all over again.
• The DRM-controlled use of the K8 proprietary format is the lynchpin of Amazon’s lock-in strategy, and by forcing the abandonment of both, publishers will, in a single stroke, end Amazon’s virtual monopoly.
• Publishers need to dispense with this nonsense and move to global rights, and global distribution, for any given language.

2 more annotations...