Amazon's strategy for marketing the Kindle makes me think of a dictator who decides he wants all the citizens of his country to live in one city.\u00a0<\/p>\n
People being, well, people with\u00a0individual patterns and practices, likes and dislikes, it's not likely that all them\u00a0will ever live in one city.\u00a0 But the dictator could certainly get more of them there by showing that his city is a safe place with\u00a0the best streets and parks and\u00a0the most jobs.\u00a0 That would attract interest.\u00a0 Then he could point out\u00a0that his city\u00a0opens its arms to everyone and respects their differences.\u00a0\u00a0I'd bet that dictator\u00a0could then watch\u00a0the steady influx\u00a0of folks from hamlets all over the land, willing to try city life because it lets them keep big parts of the things they loved about their hamlets while letting them have more jobs, more choices,\u00a0 and more possibilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Or, if the dictator is maddened with power and crazed with the determination to have it all his way, he could use a different strategy.\u00a0 He could simply kill all the citizens who live anywhere except in his favored city.\u00a0 Guess which strategy Amazon has chosen to market the Kindle?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Amazon could have opened the Kindle to accept different formats to broaden its appeal.\u00a0 In particular, Amazon owns a little company called Mobipocket.\u00a0 I'm no computer person - that's my hubby's job - but I understand that the Kindle could accept books in mobi format.\u00a0 Mobipocket has hosted an ebook distribution service for years, and ebook stores all over the planet generally feature mobipocket as one of the formats for their publications.\u00a0 Instead of broadening the reach of the Kindle, Amazon seems to be trying to kill off the competition.<\/p>\n
Like the insane dictator,\u00a0Amazon is\u00a0trying to kindle business by killing choices, including those\u00a0within its own realm.\u00a0\u00a0Some time ago, as noted above<\/a>, Amazon bought the\u00a0 little French company,\u00a0Mobipocket.\u00a0 Mobi's ebookbase distributed\u00a0independent authors' work to etailers great and small, all around the globe.\u00a0 Mind you, Mobi had its problems, including a royalty structure that had and still has the nasty little habit of not paying royalties to writers at regular intervals<\/a>.\u00a0 The Mobi structure also was a little too open, and allowed people to upload books within the public realm, those where the copyright period had expired.\u00a0 Then those\u00a0enterprising (and in my opinion, ethically challenged) uploaders - not authors- could\u00a0sell the ebooks and\u00a0make money from\u00a0someone else's\u00a0work.\u00a0 These were problems that could have been addressed pretty easily.\u00a0<\/p>\n As to royalties, Mobi could do what Kindle does - pay them 30 days after the end of the period when they are accrued, provided they are at some very minimal threshold amount - like $10.00.\u00a0 Mobi could have cleaned up the existence of hundreds of copies of public realm titles by only taking books the author wrote and owns.\u00a0 Amazon and Mobi could take the public realm titles on a first come, first served basis and only from charities.\u00a0 Let charities who give books to kids sell the titles to fund their programs.\u00a0 That would perform a public service that\u00a0would not in any way disrespect the original author of the work.\u00a0\u00a0 Amazon has addressed neither issue in a way that makes sense.<\/p>\n The great dictator has kept in place Mobi's nasty, self-serving NO royalty, royalty structure.\u00a0 And it has gone in and arbitrarily cleaned up the public realm titles.\u00a0 In one notably well-publicized case<\/a>, Amazon wiped off the titles from Kindles of people who'd purchased them.\u00a0 Mobi titles\u00a0fed up to Kindle and so the Mobi failure to restrict its service to\u00a0people posting their own work created a situation where people were making money, sometimes lots of it, by uploading titles from literary geniuses and keeping the profits in their own pockets.\u00a0 \u00a0As noted above, Amazon should have cured the multi-posting problem by saying authors post their own work and charities contact us if they want to post public realm works to fund good causes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Because Amazon didn't come in and wash\u00a0Mobi's dirty laundry, and then it allowed E-Bay's subsidiary PayPal to proclaim Mobi too dirty to deal with, I posted earlier that Amazon was clearly up to something.\u00a0 My prior post<\/a> speculated that whatever it was, the writers would come out on the losing end of the battle they couldn't fight.\u00a0 And so they have.<\/p>\n Mobi recently posted an announcement<\/a>, effective September of 2009, \u00a0that\u00a0no new publishing accounts could be created through Mobipocket to sell ebooks via Ebookbase or Kindle.\u00a0Amazon suggests that new\u00a0authors with a US address and a US bank account\u00a0publish via Kindle.\u00a0 \u00a0However, the company claims that existing ebookbase publishers could continue to upload new work.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because that way, Amazon can wait for business to dwindle and die on Mobi without ever paying out those royalties lining its coffers.\u00a0<\/p>\n The more important issue is why Amazon would take this path at all.\u00a0 Why not open the Kindle to the Mobipocket format?\u00a0\u00a0That would mean that ebook owners could load their old Mobi titles on their new device.\u00a0 Of course, it would also mean that new Kindle owners could buy books from stores all over the globe.\u00a0 Kindle owners wouldn't have to get the majority of their titles from Amazon.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rather than\u00a0killing Mobi, Amazon could have cleaned it up and broadened its reach by making all of the Amazon entities around the world ebookbase affiliates.\u00a0 That way, you could buy titles through Amazon for Kindle but you could also buy ebook titles for Mobi that you could use on your Kindle or your PC.\u00a0 That would have attracted even more business to Amazon and some of them might stay as repeat customers.<\/p>\n Instead, the crazed dictator said - IF WE KILL IT, THEY WILL COME.<\/p>\n Amazon should\u00a0have recalled that Lady Liberty's open arms made America a great melting pot - and the best place in the world to do business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Amazon's strategy for marketing the Kindle makes me think of a dictator who decides he wants all the citizens of his country to live in one city.\u00a0 People being, well, people with\u00a0individual patterns and practices, likes and dislikes, it's not likely that all them\u00a0will ever live in one city.\u00a0 But the dictator could certainly get ...continue reading \"The Amazon Strategy – If We Kill It, They Will Come\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":713,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions\/713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}