Ereaders, broadcasting and the BBC

I caught a little bit of R4′s Archive Hour last night (should be available to listen again worldwide). They were talking about how the British Broadcasting Company (now Corporation) came into being as an attempt to prevent radio manufacturers from establishing a monopoly.

Clearly, Marconi and other people who made wirelesses had a vested interested in broadcasting radio content. Without good, regular radio content, no one was going to buy their machines. But (and here I may not have followed the discussion properly) there was something of a free-for-all in broadcasting, with people stealing each other’s frequencies and so on. Marconi was the first company to set up a regular schedule. There was great concern that this would lead to a manufacturing monopoly. People would buy Marconi wirelesses so that they could listen to the Marconi programmes. This was felt to be very unfair to other manufacturers and so the BBC was created with a mandate to produce broadcast radio content that was accessible from any wireless.

Thus a broadcast monopoly was created…

Admittedly, there is no longer a broadcast monopoly in the UK, but there is still a strong ethos of making most content accessible to all devices. Digital radio channels have changed that a bit. And in TV, there are now subscription services. But even so, with a basic freeview package, there are a good 40 channels or so available from a variety of companies – BBC, ITV, C4, C5, and a host of other commercial companies.

It struck me that there is a parallel with ereaders. At the moment there are several available readers: kindle, kobo, nook, iPad etc. BUT each has their own content. You can’t (legally, probably) transfer content from one to the other. I have a kindle. If it dies and I decide to switch to a nook, I won’t be able to access the content I’ve got from Amazon. What is the result of this? It seems to me that the likely result is an Amazon monopoly. They have the best content and so people buy their devices. At the moment Kindles are sold at cost. Once they are in a settled monopoly, you can bet that won’t continue.

How do you prevent Amazon from establishing that monopoly on devices? By making their content accessible from any device.

How do you make the content accessible from any device? Establish a common format. Or remove DRM. Or make it legal to strip DRM. This is not hard.

How do you prevent Amazon from then becoming a monopolistic content provider? Sell content in mobi format or without DRM. This is not hard either.

So once again, I am left baffled. Why are other ereader manufacturers and content providers acting in a way which makes it easy for Amazon to take the monopoly position?