Hey, Elizabeth, it would be great if you used an iPhone or Touch and experienced the false “Unavailables” for yourself. They have nothing or at least very little to do directly with the specific reasons for Amazon’s Stanza purchase. Whether for innocent reasons or because Amazon wanted this, the search engine on Amazon’s server won’t show Kindle books as available to Safari users. Bizarre.

I’d further point out that there are zillions of iPhones and Touches out there, so we’re potentially talking about a number of affected people.

> “Large corporations, conspiracy theories notwithstanding, don’t always buy competitors for the purpose of burying them.”

And yet Amazon has never come out with Mobi for the iPhone, and there’s even a report that Amazon stopped Mobi from deploying the app. This is why we need a Justice Department or FTC investigation, so the feds at least can go beyond the rumors and see what really happened.

Regarding B&N’s buy of Fictionwise, Amazon left the other company with no choice but to make acquisitions like this. Like any other large company, B&N is hardly 100 percent pure. But so far, as a consumer, I seem to run into fewer gotchas than with Amazon.

> Nobody forced Lexcycle to sell to Amazon. According to all the reports they were doing just fine on their own. Or are you suggesting hitmen were dispatched to take their families hostage till they surrendered to the evil empire?

Um, I think that $10 or $15 million or whatever overcame the the previous concerns of people who earlier were espousing openness. I suspect that the money helped them persuade themselves that this would continue under Amazon.

Thanks for your comments, Elizabeth, even if we disagree here.

David

Nobody forced Lexcycle to sell to Amazon. According to all the reports they were doing just fine on their own. Or are you suggesting hitmen were dispatched to take their families hostage till they surrendered to the evil empire?

How come nobody expressed more than mild concern when Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise, which has a far larger chunk of ebook content at the moment than Kindle or Mobipocket?

Large corporations, conspiracy theories notwithstanding, don’t always buy competitors for the purpose of burying them. Sometimes they do so because the competitor has patents and/or technology they believe will improve their own service deliver. Or because the competitor has already established a market so acquiring them saves time, effort and money.

I don’t have an iPhone or iTouch, so only those who do can consider if the Stanza search engine works better than the Kindle one. If it does, consider that said search engine might be what Amazon was interested in, not cornering the ebook market.

To address one of the comments, when Ingram closed their doors to wholesaling any POD not printed by their own Lightning Source, nobody said boo, even though Ingram is unquestionably the major book wholesaler in the country, if not the world. When Amazon did essentially the same thing, mainly so they could print the books in the warehouse instead of having to stock them, suddenly they were swallowing up the industry.

Success breeds envy, and Amazon is nothing if not successful. That’s because they’re smart enough to know when it’s cheaper to pay someone else for something than it is to make it from scratch. Yes, they could pay royalties for the right to use the patent, but if you have the money to buy it outright, why would you? It’s like the real estate ads: “Why pay rent when you can own?”

There is no antitrust violation here. If the FTC or DOJ took a case against Amazon to court, it would lose.

Thanks,
David