> From September 2013, Amazon has 29% of consumer book spending while Barnes & Noble has 21%. Walmart also has a sizable share. We tend to fixate on online, but a lot of people still buy books in stores, and Amazon has 0% of that market.
Sure, but monopoly is by market, and if online vs. physical retail of books really is a distinct market (as, incidentally, you present it here) by the test applied in antitrust analysis (which I suspect it may well be), then the fact that there is also a physical book retail market that Amazon has none of would not be relevant, and combining the two markets to get a overall book spending market share would not be meaningful.
I've never bought a book online from Amazon, interestingly enough. I HAVE bought books online from indigo.ca (more often than not I just go into the local store if it's a more popular book, as it is almost certainly in stock).
Certainly there are other online book vendors around? Maybe I'm living in another world ...
You should always search for the best deal for your money. For e.g. I prefer to buy books from Amazon, but I always check Abebooks where sometime you find the international edition of the same book at 20% the price from Amazon (this doesn't really work for literature, but for Math or Programming books you have a good chance to find a better deal).
As a side note, you should probably check Amazon.ca where you have free shipment for Canada for order over $25.
That could be a lot of research. Given the nature of the books I tend to buy (usually no single item over $15-20, but in bulk orders up to $400 sometimes), I have little incentive to spend much time researching for "good deals" across multiple sites, possibly making multiple orders instead of a single order.
I'm sure if I spent an hour or two finding the lowest price on 20-30 items I could save a bit of money on the order(s), but I don't think it's really worth my time for my default use case.
Now, if I were looking at items like text books or reference books, I would likely do the research. Such materials are often sold at huge variation in price across retailers ...
If you tend to buy books in the $15-20 range doesn't make much sense to do an extensive search using a lot of sellers, but you can give Amazon.ca a try. I've found that it is cheaper to buy from Amazon than directly from a Canadian online seller and the effort is minimal.
For reference books you should definitely check alternative sellers, I've seen programming books priced at $120 in Canadian bookstore at $20 (or less for the international edition).
Sure, but monopoly is by market, and if online vs. physical retail of books really is a distinct market (as, incidentally, you present it here) by the test applied in antitrust analysis (which I suspect it may well be), then the fact that there is also a physical book retail market that Amazon has none of would not be relevant, and combining the two markets to get a overall book spending market share would not be meaningful.