PJ Media

Charlie Martin says that it is a fight between Amazon and Apple over who controls the ebook business. But commenter #29 I think has it most right: the real issue is whether publishers (Macmillan), or sellers (Apple, Amazon, etc), or authors will control the distribution of books.

I wouldn’t bet on authors. Love ‘em but no business sense, most of them, so they’ll take it in the shorts every time.

It should be publishers, but Macmillan is demonstrating that they don’t get it. They should be in the front of the ebook business. Whether they’d band together to come out with their own ebook reader, or come up with a common ebook format/DRM that they could license, they should be in the lead in figuring it out. They aren’t and it’s going to bite them hard.

So the sellers are left. The traditional brick and mortar sellers traditionally have had only modest control; the big chains could push for certain things which the publishers would yield on, and the mom-and-pop sellers got whether they could get which isn’t much. But Amazon and Apple both have long histories of getting what they want, the savvy to understand markets, and a business model that — for now — works in reaching consumers. So it’s the big on-line sellers who will win this fight.

Now then, Apple or Amazon? I’m betting that Steve Jobs’ multi-purpose tool (iPad) beats Jeff Bezos’ dedicated reader (Kindle). So just due to the hardware/software combination, Apple wins this round, and Amazon may be in the position of marketing books through an iPad app. The future? I wouldn’t count Amazon out.