On: What Amazon's ebook strategy really means

[brazzy]

"a search engine can help you find great ebooks, and where a simple payment system can let you buy them"

You just described Amazon. On top of that, they have the recommendation engine, public wishlist, affiliate program, and allow you to buy all kinds of other products via the same UI.

It's going to be very, very hard for any competitor to become attractive enough for customers to matter. I don't think even best-selling authors can just ignore that factor.

[bambax → brazzy]

Of course customers don't mind one way or the other. Authors do; they'd rather keep 100% than 70% or 30%.

[dagw → bambax]

Authors realize the importance of distribution channels. They'd rather keep 70% of 100k sales than 100% of 10k sales.