(2011-02-05) Amazon Pricing Kindle Ebooks For Market Share

Amazon may be taking a short-term hit in profits to price Kindle EBook-s low enough to build up their Market Share. Before the end of 2012, Amazon could own more than half of the U.S. book business across all formats. How stunning a development would that be? Prior to the launch of the Kindle in 2007, Amazon was widely considered to account, at most, for somewhere around 15 percent of all U.S. book sales in all formats by all retailers... 36 of the top 100 bestselling ebooks in the Kindle Store are published either by indie, direct-to-Kindle authors or by Amazon publishing subsidiary programs such as Amazon Encore, Amazon Crossing, or Kindle Singles. Scary for Book Store-s and (traditional) Book Publishing.

Update: and Kevin Kelly predicts the Kindle itself will be free, at least for Amazon Prime members. In August, 2010 I had the chance to point it out to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. He merely smiled and said, "Oh, you noticed that!" And then smiled again.