(2021-09-14) Carmody What Could Ebookstores Be Like

Tim Carmody: What Could E-Bookstores Be Like? ...an interview with Bookshop.org’s Andy Hunter (2021-09-12-WithSalesMomentumBookshoporgLooksToFutureInItsFightWithAmazon)

here’s one item in particular that I wish had gotten more attention: Amazon, of course, is the biggest challenge for the company

Essentially, Amazon has the most popular e-readers and the most popular e-bookstore

DRM. Amazon DRM won’t work outside an Amazon device or application, and Amazon won’t let books with other companies’ DRM work on the Kindle.

If you eliminated DRM as a factor altogether, than any publisher that chose to be could also be a digital bookstore; every print bookstore could be a digital bookstore. Indeed, you or I could open digital bookstores and sell e-books at a small markup, competing on the best curation, the best recommendations, or the best additional services we could offer to justify our margins.

it is difficult to see how Amazon, for example, could sync a customer’s current pages read across devices on applications where it cannot exercise some sort of digital control over the app or object being read

Amazon certainly has no incentives to change how it makes its e-books available or to further open up its own machines. True! But perhaps a court of law might decide that such arrangements were anticompetitive and could change

I replied to his twitter thread....