Limited Selection

[Crodley]

Hi all,

I've yet to buy an Ereader of any brand. I do a lot of fiction reading, and mostly I like authors that have series. Like Loren Eslteman's Amos Walker, or John Sandford's Lucas Davenport.

The problem I have found when researching each reader's store is that while they DO carry the authors I like, they do NOT carry all the books in a series.

If I wanted to read all of Walter Mosely's Easy Rawlins detective stories in order, I couldn't. They only offer some of the books in that series. Each series I like has a limited supply in the chain. This may be ok for the series I've already read, but what of the ones I've yet to come across? My mother says the series that starts with Lawrence Sanders "The First Deadly Sin" is a great series, but will I be restricted to only every other book or less? ***(Never mind, I just checked and none of the books in this series are available on either site)***

For a detailed example, let's look at the John Sandford books featuring the character Lucas Davenport. To date there are 17 books in the series. Here's a look at the first ten in order:

A=Amazon Kindle Store, S=Sony Reader Store

1 Rules of Prey (1989) A - Yes, S - Yes
2 Shadow Prey (1990) A - Yes, S - Yes
3 Eyes of Prey (1991) A - Yes, S - Yes
4 Silent Prey (1992) A - Yes, S - Yes
5 Winter Prey (1993) A - Yes, S - Yes
6 Night Prey (1994) A - No, S - Yes
7 Mind Prey (1995) A - No, S - No
8 Sudden Prey (1996) A - No, S - No
9 Secret Prey (1998) A - Yes, S - Yes
10 Certain Prey (1999) A - Yes, S - Yes

So you see, if you wanted to read this fine series in order, you couldn't on either platform. And I'm pretty sure all these books hit the bestseller's list.

My hope is that Amazon just started in this market and it will fill out, but the Sony store has been around awhile, and it still has large gaps in those types of series. You think my hope is unfounded?

Thoughts?

Crodley

[brecklundin]

it's not just Amazon, as you see with Sony, but every site that sells ebooks. Several of the authors I would love to build a library of, who happen to be dead, likely will never make it to ebook versions before I croak.

In those cases it is whoever the current rights holder is either unaware or not interested in ebook offerings.

It's still a big mess but hopefully it will fix itself soon enough. yeah, right.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by Crodley

So you see, if you wanted to read this fine series in order, you couldn't on either platform. And I'm pretty sure all these books hit the bestseller's list.

In this particular case Night Prey seems to be readily available in Sony, eReader & MS Reader formats, but not Mobipocket (& I suppose by extension Kindle format). The other one is not just unavailable for Sony or Kindle, but is unavailable in any format.

These are Penguin books so they'd be the publisher to contact to get them available & you're right it makes no sense to not have them available if you're going to make the rest of the series available.

In my observation Penguin is the most inconsistent publisher that does ebooks (but at least they do them, unlike some others). They used to charge more than the cost of the equivalent edition in paper for their ebooks (so a 7.99 paperback would cost 9.99 as an ebook), but they've finally stopped that.

They have a tendency to 'forget' to lower the price when a book shifts from HC to PB though, at least in the formats they release directly. For example Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris has been in PB for almost a year, but in the formats Penguin does directly (MS Reader, PDF & eReader) the book still costs $23.95 msrp, instead of $7.99 - however the MobiPocket version (which Penguin doesn't sell directly) is $7.99 msrp (I assume the Kindle version is too). So what happens is someplace like Fictionwise just drops the other formats & doesn't carry them anymore. Very frustrating.

For some reason also their books seem to almost always be the ones places like Fictionwise & Books On Board only have the Mobi version available even when the other versions are out there according to Penguin. I don't know if it's some messed up distribution scheme or what.

They also seem to not make certain books available themselves, but yet there will be a Mobi version available. You'd think if they're going to go to the trouble of making the text available to Mobi for their edition then they'd want to maximize their earnings by making it available in the other formats too. (Most times if they let Mobi release it, Sony has it too).

It really seems like they don't know what they want to do as far a ebooks go so they just do everything in as unorganized a fashion as possible. I'm getting all my info together along with examples to send to them in hopes they may actually listen. Since Penguin includes lots of popular labels including Ace, Roc, Berkley, DAW, Jove, Putnam & others it effects a lot of titles.



Sorry, I know I went into thing more than necessary there.



Another example of a series with gaps is Faye Kellerman's series from Harper Collins. They have every book, but #'s 3, 4 & 11 out as ebooks. When I emailed them last week & asked about it I was very pleased with the reply I got. They noted that they were on their radar & hoped to have all three out this year sometime.