Did you get contact information for the Sony Reader Evangelist? There're a few points I'd like to get through to such a person.
- First, a source of content for them. Baen purchases non-exclusive electronic rights from their authors. That means that all of those books are also available to any other e-seller who wants to make a deal with those authors and their agents. Thus, you see many of those books also available on Fictionwise (for example). Going this route would give them access to several hundred SF and Fantasy novels, including a number of NYT bestsellers. The downside is that they'd have to compete with Baen's "low prices and no encryption" e-sales model.
- Nextly, I don't use the Connect store at all. Because I can't! They can't be bothered to support the Mac, so I'm locked out of doing business with them. And I'm certainly not going to spend money on a windows machine (or on parallels and Windows) just to get access to the connect store. I'd remind them that many market studies indicate that Mac users have higher average disposable income than PC users, and that Mac users average about 2x the online purchases made per year. So the "mac share" of their potential market is at least 2x what the percentages look like if you only consider the hardware numbers.
- Lastly, I'll never purchase another encrypted eBook. I've been through the process of being orphaned twice so far (once with an RCA/Rocket eBook, and once with a proprietary music device), and I refuse to risk it again. I know from other avenues that Sony is willing to sell unencrypted content. I'd appreciate it if they (a) hurried up with making some of it available, (b) clearly marked which content is encrypted, and which is not, and (c) made it easy to search for ((whatever-else-I-wanted) AND not-encrypted), so that I don't even have to look at the encrypted offerings.
Until the last two items are addressed, it's :behead: for the Connect store, as far as getting any of my money goes.