Apple V Amazon: The Clash of the Titans

Amazon and Apple are locked in a battle to dominate the eBook market - Amazon's Kindle devices and electronic bookstore now dominate a nascent but booming market, accounting for more than 70 percent of electronic reader sales and 80 percent of e-book purchases, according to some analysts. And on Thursday it will take a page from Apple and announce that it is opening up the Kindle to outside software developers.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Apple’s much-anticipated tablet computer, which is widely expected to be announced next Wednesday and go on sale this spring, will be a far more versatile (and expensive) device that will offer access to books, newspapers and other reading material through Apple’s popular App Store on iTunes.

“Will Kindle pricing trump Apple sex appeal? Isn’t that the question, really?” said Richard Charkin, executive director of Bloomsbury Publishing in London, who has been watching developments in e-book sales with keen interest. “I haven’t the faintest idea. All I would say is, great. The more people that are out there marketing books in digital or any other format, the better.”

The Archive follows all this with interest - Amazon are a wonderful store, so convenient and they have everything, but they have too much dominance at the moment. Recently Apple Insider published a breakdown of how Amazon's deal with publishers over eBooks works. According to Apple, the Amazon deals works thus:

• The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99
• This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book
• The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights
• The title will be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech. This list of features will grow over time as Amazon continues to add more functionality to Kindle and the Kindle Store.
• Under this royalty option, books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. Amazon will provide tools to automate that process, and the 70 percent royalty will be calculated off the sales price.

This is still a new market, but one that is thriving. A standard format needs to be reached soon or risk losing consumer confidence. The Kindle will play a big part in the future of ePublishing, but it really isn't healthy for one firm to have such dominance.

Predicting the outcome of all this would seem impossible but one thing is certain, the eBook saga is certainly going to be interesting.