Amazon!

After many sleepless nights wondering what company I was going to blog about this semester, I have decided to focus on Amazon. I picked Amazon because I think they are an interesting company who was ahead of their time in taking advantage of the internet as a marketplace. They started off as simply an online bookstore, but now are the world's largest online retailer. Another reason I picked Amazon is due to the amount of information I will likely be able to find on them over the course of the semester.

While looking over information about the company today, I stumbled across an article that talked about the e-book market that Amazon is involved with. The theme of the article was basically that Amazon is currently dominating the e-book market, but that their dominance might be short lived. Currently they hold about a 90% market share, but the entrance of other players into the market will likely lower their share to around 72% by year's end. The immediate competitor that Amazon is facing is Apple. Apple is releasing their e-book friendly device in the form of the iPad this spring, which should deal a huge blow to Amazon's dominance. It has also been rumored that Google is going to be releasing a similar tablet in the near future. Due to the emergence of these two players into the market, analysts believe that within five years Amazon's marketshare could fall to 35%. Although this is a huge decline in marketshare, Amazon's e-book sales are expected to increase from $248 million to $775 million over the same time period as e-books become more popular.