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Bezos the future e-book monopolist? Amazon drops ‘e-Documents’ to favor Mobipocket
August 2, 2006 | 8:05 am
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By David Rothman
If e-book shoppers look for the “e-Documents” section at Amazon.com, the giant retailer will refer them to the Mobipocket site. Amazon cozily owns Mobipocket.
Boasting annual revenue of $9 billion from books and other items, the company is truly intent on becoming the octopus of e-books.
If only Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair were alive to write up Jeff Bezos and friends. Amazon is using the company’s wealth and power to popularize its inferior Mobipocket format at the expense of rivals. I love the aesthetics and features of the French-created Mobipocket, but in DRM matters and some other important technical ways, this format sucks. Hey, dear readers, didn’t I warn you about Jeff’s ambitions? Perhaps publishers should talk to Toys ‘R Us.
Detail: At least the Amazon-exclusive “shorts” are available in PDF, HTML and TXT for now. And listings for individual books still mention Adobe and Microsoft. However, I suspect that Bezos would love to Mobize everything later. The more powerful Jeff grows, the less clout for publishers and writers and independent retailers. His use of a nonproprietary format would certainly reduce my fears. How about it, Jeff?
The anti-trust angle: Hello, Justice Department and anti-trust experts on Capitol Hill? Won’t it be time to pass new laws to cover Amazon-type situations if the book industry can’t agree on a nonproprietary standard? Conglomerate-dicated ties betweeen content and formats are a genuine threat to competition and, perhaps in the future, the book industry’s freedom of expression. Imagine if someday a Bible Belt-based giant buys up Amazon to “reform” it. A similar threat in the past has already been made against CBS. Of course, the Bush White House would probably cheer on the censors and monopolists. Dream on about vigorous anti-trust enforcement as long as George Bush is in office and the present Republicans control Congress. I’m not being partisan here, just realistic. Monopolists of all ideologies, Bezos included, will benefit with the present pols running the country.
Message on the about-to-go-AWOL e-Documents page: See below.
(Spotted via forum item in MobileRead.)
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Comments:
I went and checked out some e-books I bought from Amazon. They are listed but NOT available in the format I bought them (usually mslit) on their web page. In my Amazon bookshelf, I tried to redownload one, and after the Firefox scare (download not available because it’s drm mslit, so no Firefox – I always forget that somehow…), I switched rermdering engines inside a Firefox tab to IE (isn’t Firefox cool or what!) and the download worked for now at least…
Since anyway I buy most of my ebooks from Fictionwise or directly from the publisher (Baen but also Harper Colins and others too), the Amazon thing is not a big deal for now. After they lose money from ebooks they will reconsider; monopoly has not worked with toys, it’s not going to work with ebooks either.
Liviu
“After they lose money from ebooks they will reconsider; monopoly has not worked with toys, it’s not going to work with ebooks either.”
Many thanks for your thoughts, Liviu, and may you be right! I’m just concerned that via alliances between Amazon and others, we’ll get monopolies that stick. – David
Hi,
The way I see it monopolies work only there is a natural necessity for the given product, not when the product is a choice.
Amazon is my favourite online store, and I bought from them tons of books, music, movies, computers, electronics (including a large screen TV), sports equipment, tools, even apparel, I use them as my homepage on Firefox alongside their search engine a9, I even sold 3 (!) used books that I have in double editions through them, but I never bought toys through them, though I spend tons of money on toys for my son. The reason is simple, they never offered me anything I could not get at the nearby Toys’r Us. The same will be with ebooks, Fictionwise, the publishers… will offer them in formats I want, and if not I can always buy the print, use the library and so on. There is nothing that forces me to buy a prc book from Amazon.
If you talk about computer OS, energy, internet connection, phone, water, these are things that I NEED, so I will get them wherever I can and there you have a natural monopoly or quasimonopoly power.
Then you have liquidity/lock in cases like Ebay, iTMS, where there is a dominant power due to mainly technical issues, but that’s not the case with ebooks either.
Liviu
Thanks for your further comments, Liviu. My concern isn’t the present so much as the future, especially if Amazon teams up with other biggies to reinforce the Mobipocket efforts. Even in the present, however, smaller publishers have problems such as having to do a new format. Meanwhile keep in mind that like eBay, the Amazon infrastructure and content are special. I doubt that individual rivals come close in the number of reader annotations of paper books. This can be leveraged for the electronic side. Thanks. David
Hi,
surprisingly for me the Mobipocket platform is not totally locked in.
It is very much like the iTunes software working with the iTunes Music Store.
You should have a look at the Songbird program which aims to be an open/free alternative to iTunes.
I think what we need here is the same. An open/free alternative for programs like the Mobipocket Reader.
I was/am trying to create one. The project is called Scrolls, and it’s registered at Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/scrolls
I haven’t done much work on it yet… but then again it’s difficult to compete with a 9000000000$ business
Thanks, Simon, and best of luck with your efforts. Actually OSoft’s dotReader, the first implementation of OpenReader, in which I’m involved, is indeed open source. Ideally people will build on what dotReader is up to, so that’s another option for you. What bothers me about Mobipocket’s DRM is the four-machine limit, along with the trouble that a local library system has had getting it to work on my machine. I dislike DRM in general (it’s in dotReader only because the publishers insisted on it) and the machine-tied variety in particular. Thanks! David
[...] Amazon to drop LIT and PDF e-books from its list There hasn’t been much attention paid to Amazon lately, but apparently the giant Internet retailer has decided to reduce its e-books offerings to the Mobipocket format. Remember, last year they bought Mobipocket for a few million bucks, and while no one of us would have believed them to shut down the other formats entirely, we already guessed they would have big plans for the formerly French e-book format. Our reader mdb139 received word from Amazon earlier this week where they clearly stated their plans to abandon the Microsoft and Adobe formats. Excerpt: We are working on removing Microsoft and Adobe format e-books from Amazon.com, and soon they will no longer available for purchase. If you previously purchased an e-book on Amazon.com or purchase an available item before the availability changes, you will still have access to it through Your Media Library in Your Account up to 30 days after the purchase date. Shouldn’t we be concerned now about our previously purchased e-books, which may disappear from the Adobe Media Library any day? Also check out this related entry from David/Teleread who is not exactly excited about Adobe’s affection for Mobipocket. [...]