Amazon has one of the most closed ecosystems in the world. When you buy ebooks from the e-commerce giant, they are incompatible with any other e-reader or tablet. Many people are either for or against this business model, but Booksellers group Pages & Pages is especially against it. On the 3rd Saturday of every month, Pages & Pages will be declaring a Kindle Amnesty. Purchase a BeBook Touch on that day and trade a Kindle in at the same time, and Pages & Pages will give you a $50 gift voucher.
Amazon has over 65% of the ebook market in Australia and over 75% of e-readers owned in Australia are Kindles. Pages & Pages realizes that the average customer has no idea that they are locked into the walled garden of Amazon. Pages is seeking to educate the broader Australian sector with Kobo and Bebook e-readers that are ebook agnostic. Their primary ebook format is EPUB, which allows you to shop at any online bookstore and load the books right on your device.
General Manager of Pages & Pages Booksellers said in a recent blog post, “Pages & Pages is no longer sitting passively by while Amazon steals our customers and steals their reading choices. Through this campaign we want people to understand what Amazon is doing and make an informed choice to have choice.”
He went on to say that “The ebook is not a threat to physical bookshops. This new format presents bookshops and readers with many wonderful opportunities to sell and read more books. What does threaten bookshops is a company who engages in uncompetitive behaviour, pays no tax in Australia and misleads readers with restrictive devices and fake book reviews.”
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.