Interesting story about Amazon wanting to tighten the grip on its on-demand printing service. I’m so locked in to Amazon now, I can’t escape. I’m already an Amazon Prime member (unbelievably good value) and I use the DVD by post service. Basically, you’d have to get me out with a crow bar if you were a rival online retailer.
But as O’Reilly elegantly distinguishes, this form of marketing relationship is implicit lock-in. Their new Print On Demand rules are an explicit lock-in that publishers don’t like one bit. And as a consumer, I don’t like it either. It seems like an abuse of their market dominance.
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Agree. I bleed Amazon (prime) blood too … yet way back at the beginning, when it was only Amazon.com and there was no .co.uk version, I was a bi of a tart and used Barnes and Noble too. I enjoyed being able to choose.
A bit like driving past the local Tesco superstore and parking up a quarter of a mile further up the road outside the slightly smaller but more usable Sainsburys. (Other brands do exist – though you’ll drive a good bit further before you find a green Asda sign.)
And a bit like the iTunes/AAC lock-in with Apple. As a consumer you trust the brand at that moment … but would really like an insurance policy that allows you to change your mind with minimal disruption at a later date.
[...] That’s one of the objections – and there are many – that I have to Microsoft. Unfortunately, Amazon seem to be going down a similar path as reported by O’Reilly (via Tom Watson). Essentially, they are saying that people who self-publish books and want to sell them through Amazon can only sell them through Amazon. It is, ultimately, an anti-competitive practice as it uses Amazon’s weight to make it nigh-on impossible for competitors to enter the market. It is serious enough to make me think about whether I’d be able to keep using Amazon. [...]
Have to admit I amazon too. However their Union relations are legendary and abysmal and I don’t yet carry their adverts on my blog. Dilemmas.
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