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Friday, March 2, 2012

Publishing News: Its time to break the stick

Publishing News: It's time to break the stick: "[Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble] have far more control over whose ebooks see the light of day because they also own the major ereading platforms, and they are making decisions based not on what they think consumers want to read but on their own competitive interests."

Ingram also pointed out that blame for the oligopoly marketplace in the U.S. doesn't fall solely on the chain store giants:

Publishers are partly to blame for the walled-garden status of the market as well, since they handed Amazon and Apple the stick of digital-rights management, which the two companies are now using to beat them.

Ingram's post is a must-read and a clear warning of what the future will hold if something doesn't change: "Welcome to the mutually incompatible, silo-based, platform-dependent and user-unfriendly future of books."