Rivals, Publishers Take Aim at Kindle

When you are at the top, you are going to have a bulls eye on your back. That’s exactly what’s happening with Amazon Kindle. Now that it has soundly dominated its rivals such as Sony Reader, rival companies are stepping up their efforts to beat Amazon in its own game. Amazon Kindle may be a decent gadget, but it does have holes. So it’s only logical for Sony to go after one of those weaknesses. By supporting open formats, Sony is upping the ante in a desperate attempt to recover its leadership in a market that it dominated for years.

Other competitors have not been idle either. Plastic Logic is forming its own partnerships to build a decent content bank for its users. And let’s forget about Apple and Google and their attempts to insert themselves into the conversation. So far now rival has came up with a reader that can truly challenge Amazon Kindle but such a device could be in the works.

Amazon is not just fighting its rivals in the e-book market. Some publishers are also taking aim at Amazon. The company is known for keeping a healthy part of the profits generated from its content for itself. So publishers are not getting a great deal from Amazon. That has made some to consider working with Amazon’s competitors instead. Amazon may have won the battle in the e-book market, but the war is coming. Considering that we will have more readers in the very near future, Amazon Kindle will find itself competing against worthy competitors. How Amazon handles this new level of competition will tell us a lot about how the platform will turn out.