Interestingly a lot of data they say they're using is available to any bookstore. I wonder if there are small mom-and-pop chains that use Amazon ratings and sales ranks as cues for their buyer.
A tie-in to an e-reader that still makes the bookstore money is a killer feature for me as a reader. Indies still haven't gotten that totally sorted yet, and it keeps me buying more paper books than I'd like, and also buying less books at indie's than I'd like at the same time.
A friend of mine gave me guff about my kindle -- his parents had a book store, but couldnt keep it open. I started to think about how an indie book store could work in an ereader world; my ideas:
You'd need an ereader with a small nfc reader or barcode scanner. Customers browsing the paper books in store could elect to buy the same book for the ereader in store if they wanted by just scanning the book with their ereader, then taking it up to the front and pressing a 'show cart' feature that would give a barcode for the cashier to scan, bringing up the cart total payable. Upon that payment finishing, the ereader would get a ping from a server and instruct it to download the ebooks just purchased. The store would get a majority of the cut of the vendor side of the sale (if amazon takes 30%, a bookstore would get 25% and the service provider/ebook mfg would get 5$).
This would allow people to support indie stores, continue to buy both ebooks and regular books, and do them both at the same time.
It's not a complete or foolproof plan, just an idea I had that could help batter down the hatches.
The more you think about it, both the indie book store owner and Amazon would have no incentive to participate. The indie book owner wouldn't want to give away 20% of gross sales to survive, because there isn't much there to begin with.
If Amazon books takes off, maybe they franchise it out and allow personal branding of some kind.
A tie-in to an e-reader that still makes the bookstore money is a killer feature for me as a reader. Indies still haven't gotten that totally sorted yet, and it keeps me buying more paper books than I'd like, and also buying less books at indie's than I'd like at the same time.