Charlie Stross (author) has an excellent blog entry about Amazon’s ebook strategy. Great article: I love it when I read something interesting, and learn something – such as Amazon as a “monopsony“.
While I knew what a monopoly was (there is only one seller to many buyers), the term “monopsony” (where one buyer has many sellers) was new to me. It also appears to be new to my spellchecker, which keeps trying to change it to “monopoly”. Right. Amazon has made itself both a monopoly and monopsony. Go read Charlie’s blog.
And he’s with me regarding DRM (which must die if publishers are to live; again, read his blog):
I won’t actually advocate violating license terms and conditions, but I’ll cop to doing so myself (insofar as if I buy a DRM’d ebook, I think I’d be mad not to strip the DRM and make an archival copy strictly for my own future use).
-Charlie Stross, from “What Amazon’s ebook strategy means“
What he said!!
