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I spent some quality time with an indie bookstore owner today, and got to handle his demo glo. (MHO: 2.1.5 FW sucks, and the slide control for brightness leaves ghosting on the screen.)
Some things to keep in mind when wondering about why EVERY INDIE IN THE WORLD isn't jumping on this bandwagon:
* Agency pricing is not long for this world, and in a world where vendors can lowball on retail, everyone is up against Amazon.
* Depending on publisher, Kobo does actually do some aggressive discounting (vs. Google) right now. While it's right that the retail store only gets a piece of the pie, as they did with the Google deal, that pie is getting smaller.
* That piece of that smaller pie is getting smaller, too. The indie's cut from the sale of a Kobo ebook is 8.4%, smaller than the (unknown to me) cut Google was offering. 84 cents on a $10 book.
* Under the ABA/Google deal, indie retailers were paying $200 a month for the privilege of access to the program. It is unknown what their future monthly cost is going to be, but they had to affiliate-sell a lot of books under the Google program to even hit that $200, which was one of the reasons retailers are not all that excited about yet another dive into these waters.
* Store owners only get a 5% cut on hardware sales (Calculate 5% of $129 or $79). Furthermore, it is only during the introductory/launch period that they'll be able to return these things. What are small retailer credit card fees these days? 4%?
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