[adventured]

It's impressive how dramatically wrong Steve Jobs was about the iPad when it came to the ebooks market. He missed by a mile in understanding exactly how customers wanted to consume ebooks.

So here we are, Apple has sold a bazillion iPads, and yet Amazon dominates ebooks. And there's absolutely no threat on the horizon coming from Apple in the ebooks market.

[stock_toaster]

  > So here we are, Apple has sold a bazillion iPads, and yet Amazon dominates ebooks. 

There is a kindle app for the ipad. Even while the kindle experience on the ipad is sub par[1], I think the difference in price (cheaper), features (whispersync, email to kindle), and existing library keep people in the amazon ecosystem (via kindle app).

  [1]: you can't purchase books from inside the app because amazon doesn't want to pay apple

[ricardobeat]

The lack of in-app sales is overrated IMO. You don't sit down with an iPad and think "hmm, maybe I should buy a book". There's a great chance you're browsing the web when you get the idea, so you just hop over to amazon and do a one-click purchase.

[stock_toaster]

Strongly disagree. I have often finished a book and though, "hmm, that was great. I want to read the next one in the series". But wait! I have to pop over to the browser, log in[1], search and the book I want, buy it, then go back to kindle app, sync....

It could be sooo much better. Is there a next book in the series I am reading that I don't yet own? Show it on the "would you like to rate this book" page or something. Take my money amazon! Take it faster!

[1]: Which due to my own idiosyncrasies requires me to fire up 1password and copy my ridiculous password to paste it into amazon login.

[mortehu]

... and it's not like it requires a lot of effort to switch to the web browser on an iPad. Just swipe up with four fingers and touch the Safari icon. And at that point, you don't have to deal with the terribly slow monochromatic screen.

[freyr]

Did Jobs actually expect the iPad to dominate the ebooks market?

I think he was determined to create the best iPad he could, not the best ebook reader. So his goal was to optimize the ebook experience for the iPad (not optimize the iPad for ebooks). And given that goal, he negotiated a good deal.

[matt-attack]

And why is that?