[dageshi]

KU is amazing.

There's entire genres like litrpg, progression fantasy and cozy fantasy that likely would either not exist or be a fraction of their current size without it.

And authors can make a living, there's plenty in those genres (not to mention romance) who via a combination of patreon + KU + Audible are doing just fine.

I too wish there was someone who could compete with amazon, but the thing is nobody seems to actually even try? I feel like the entire book industry would be quite happy if things had remained stuck in time circa 1990, on their own they would never have invented something like KU.

[mcphage]

> I too wish there was someone who could compete with amazon, the thing is nobody seems to actually even try?

Apple was starting to compete, got sued by the US government for it, and decided they didn’t need to bother.

[goosedragons]

I mean, they did it illegally. Their fault for doing it that way. Kobo is competing with Amazon pretty well.

US market is heavily skewed in Amazon's favor though.

[BobaFloutist]

Sure doesn't help that unless you go out of your way to buy a third-party device, there's platform lock-in, which was never an issue with physical publishing.