Amazon Again and the Struggle of Japanese E-Readers

So if a company has the best product at the best price and has a motto of providing “Every book ever printed, in every language, available to buy in 60 seconds,” is it a bad thing for them to have a monopoly?

To everyone who has been struggling with the growing Amazon tycoon, yes, this is a bad thing. Small eReader makers, small publishers, and small xyz have been fidgeting under the reign of Amazon's growth for the past several years, and with the big rain forest of cheap media and materials showing no sign of slowing, the news has been fragrant with mentions of the online shopping database.

First Europe, trying to ban the website. Publishers doing sketchy deals with the price platforms. And the latest-- Japan struggling with their own companies as Amazon grows in Asia.

Joshua Hunt reported in his article "Japan’s E-Reader Industry Struggles to Keep Up as Amazon Takes the Lead" that the Kindle e-Reader

"quickly became Japan’s top-selling e-reader, gaining 38.3 percent of the market, according to the MM Research Institute, a data firm in Tokyo. Even though Rakuten’s Kobo had beaten Kindle to market by nearly five months, it grabbed only 33 percent of Japan’s e-reader sales during the same 12-month period. Sony, which had stated its goal of selling half of all e-readers by 2012, managed to hold only 25.5 percent with its devices."

Apparently, one of the main reasons behind Amazon's rampant popularity are their prices-- an aspect that I have mentioned before in my own reasons for using the shopping website. Cheaper prices and better availability generally win the prize. But according to the author of "The Truth About the E-book Revolution," Munechika Nishida, price isn't the only thing that is giving Amazon a foot-up. It's their ease of use and understanding. Users can access and browse hundreds of thousand of products from the comfort of their home with hardly any effort, whereas other shopping sites and systems (Barnes & Noble's online bookstore being a prominent example) are just too confusing, not updated, or too difficult to use.

Hunt's article cites a few examples of everyday book buyers and their new habits, including:

"Nao Takada, a 26-year-old employee of the Japan Automobile Federation, was visiting a Tokyo bookstore, but she, like readers in other parts of the world, may be buying less there. She said she bought the Kindle Paperwhite because it was small and easy to carry, and added that she liked the ease with which she could browse purchases."

She apparently still goes to normal bookstores, but more for the purpose of browsing and finding books that she can later buy online.

Immediately the mind goes to the used bookstore, as we have discussed many times, and worry arises that our quaint gems of undiscovered literary treasure will disappear forever. However,

"In Tokyo’s Jimbocho neighborhood, famous for more than 100 years for its used and specialty bookshops, Hiroshi Kobayashi of Komiyama Books said customers sometimes used their smartphones to snap photos of books they planned to download later. Still, he said that he didn’t consider the Kindle a threat to his livelihood — yet."

 Used book stores are for the purpose of not only finding a deal, which Amazon is taking over, but for finding classics and treasures that you can't get online. And until online browsing finds a way to replicate that for the masses (as opposed to online auction halls for the truly unique and rare), used bookstores will likely remain at least largely untouched, if not entirely unsinged.