TeleRead

It's not about competition between products, it's about competition between distributors of the same product.

To use your app store example, you would need to imagine an alternate universe where there are two competing iOS App Stores: one run by, say, Apple and another by Amazon. You're Macmillr, one of the hottest startups in the valley, and you have a bunch of apps you want to get on the market.

In this world, you sell your apps "wholesale" to Apple and Amazon. Apple comes to you and says "I'll buy your apps for $0.50 per copy", and you forge a similar deal with Amazon. Then they compete with each other to on-sell them to the public. Obviously, that's pretty difficult for the two 'A's. How do they compete with someone selling an equally-priced product?

First they'd reduce their own margins as much as possible. Then maybe they do some clever discounting tricks, loss-leaders and promos and the like. Maybe they add some intangibles like a nice recommendation system or a pretty shop UI. Eventually, though, you just know one of them is going to come back to you and say "Forget your $0.50. I want it for $0.45."

So now you're in a tough spot, because Apple controls 90% of the app market. If they say "$0.45 or we walk", there's not much you can do about it. Bad times. As you see this happening, you realise something: Apple must have reached this dominant position by price gouging you and your fellow developers. At this rate, it'll only get more popular and more powerful, which…

Japan's efforts in hi-tech have always been different than other places, transport engineering, robotics, electronics, etc. Basically "stuff" but not software. I think it could be successfully argued that Japan is miles ahead of the West in certain areas like robotics or mobile digital television transmission.

Software on the other hand has long been the Achilles heal of the Japanese technology industry. I read a great article one time on why that is (sorry I couldn't find the link to it, but this is somewhat along the same line http://gizmodo.com/5069366/why-zen-software-design-does-not-come-from-japan ) that attributes it to generally historic reasons. Principally that the Japanese language was hard to build into cheap computers early in the electronics boom and the result is that efforts (both engineering and in terms of cultural assimilation) simply went into other areas. Instead of PCs, people had fancy cell phones. Instead of people going into software and interface engineering, they went into analog and digital circuit designs. You could commonly get a cell phone in Japan that could take photos and videos, pay for a soda, access the Internet had ring tones (both for you and for the caller), could play games and mp3s long before you could get the equivalent in the U.S. Which sounds great on a pure features list, but the software on the phones generally stank.

While hardware engineering in Japan is generally more mature than the equivalent in the West, the opposite is…

I think we'll look back at this and say "That is when the whole house of cards collapsed." The notions of the Internet being "somewhere else" and the rules being coded by the body legislating the person who is accessing it, is untenable. I expect a lot of churn on the privacy, tax, and access (censorship) policies which have grown up over the years.

Consider:

* France (and China) trying to impose content
restrictions on Google results. [1]

* The EU invalidating the safe harbor privacy rules.[2]

* The recent invalidation of tax strategies in the
Netherlands and Luxembourg. [3]

These are all soverign issues. And for anyone who has ever looked at the Internet as a "place" intuitively understands how impractical it is to have the rules be based on that origin of the connection in meat space.

The depth and complexity of this particular confluence of concepts is really staggering. I can not even imagine how you would establish an institution to "rule" the Internet. I might even go so far as to assert it isn't possible. What I fear is that what is possible is the Chinese model where every country has its own "Internet" and your ability to access it from outside, or to leave it from inside, will be governed by some electronic equivalent of a passport. And that idea brings the whole "identity" question really out to the forefront of the discussion.

Very interesting challenges ahead.

[1]…

> The complaint claims that the five publishing houses forced Amazon to abandon its discount pricing and adhere to a new agency model, in which publishers set prices and extinguished competition so that retailers such as Amazon could no longer offer lower prices for e-books.

> If Amazon attempted to sell e-books below the publisher-set levels, the publishers would simply deny Amazon access to the title, the complaint claims.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hg3Qe5XrIb-vs2SxDp7BBT8GFgVg?docId=CNG.a2db03834cda342663b48fb1e7f322ce.2d1

Similarly,

> Recently, you may have heard that a small group of UK publishers will require booksellers to adopt an “agency model” for selling e-books. Under this model, publishers set the consumer price for each e-book and require any bookseller to sell at that price. This is unlike the traditional wholesale model that’s been in place for decades, where booksellers set consumer prices.

http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/amazon-uk-tells-customers-about-agency-pricing-and-resulting-higher-prices/

This is the price-fixing Amazon is complaining about: "you can't sell our books unless you sell them at our prices." As far as I know, their complaint has nothing to do with royalty percentages or competition with Apple's iBook prices.

(edited for clarity)

I was with you right up the the false analogy to the "lend me" feature on Kindles. The entire benefit of ebooks is that they're digital, yes. This makes them convenient to buy, to carry around and/or read from multiple devices. Sharing is not implied. The fact that it's easy to copy an ebook doesn't make it lawful. There's still a little thing called copyright, granted by governments to encourage the arts and allow artists to be paid for their work. The extent to which an ebook can be copied should be up to the copyright holder. That doesn't mean that ebooks can't be posted publicly or loaned out, either to a friend or by the public library, as asserted in the better reasoned argument by Richard Stallman. http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/richard-stallman-on-freedom-or-copyright-why-not-an-information-utopia/ Stallman, at least, is forthright about his desire to eliminate copyright. Authors don't have to agree with him and clearly many - for example, all who sign up with Amazon and price their works at greater than $0 - don't think it is in their interests to do so. Authors don't even necessarily think the Kindle lending feature is a good idea and have to be enticed into the program by the possibility of pro rata royalties.

Like with any such claims, I opened up a tor-browser and looked if the claim can be supported by sources. Demanding sources, is the one rule that Wikipedia can never drop, in the same way that HN can't drop rules against spam. If HN became a cesspool of spam, HN would die. If Wikipedia dropped the requirement for sources, it would die.

Checking the wikipedia talk page of Piers Anthony, not a single editor is brining a source to the discussion. A google search gave a hasty reference in a respectable article (http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/amazon-defends-pulls-self-published-pedophilia-e-book/), a newspaper columnists article (http://litreactor.com/columns/themes-of-pedophilia-in-the-works-of-piers-anthony), and a bunch unverifiable blog posts.

So... its a fair chance to include such statement if someone used those sources to support such edit. Without any sources however, any such edit should not be on wikipedia. If you want to complain about whitewashing, please leave out discussions where a bunch of opinionated people are simply voicing their opinions but can't be bothered to do a simple google search.