Originally Posted by wgrimm
I have been trying to download my inaccessible books every day, and was finally successful yesterday. I was able to download all but 2 of the 40 or so books previously inaccessible.
But ereader, and for that matter Fictionwise and their parent company- I believe that is B&N, has lost me as a customer. It wasn't just the problems with downloading, but their inane "customer disservice" reply where they showed me their "terms of service.". The pool of ebook readers is comparatively small; fewer than exist for music and movies. When a bookseller starts pissing off the customers that buy many books, they are going to have some problems.
It's too bad. I started buing from them when they were Peanut Press, and customer service was excellent. Recently, it has sucked. A year or so ago, when pointed out to them that their book prices were more than double Amazon's in many cases,Customer Disservice gave me another inane reply- they told me that their customers liked the higher prices because of the many special offer programs they had....
Yeah, right. What happened is that they lost sales; if I saw something on ereader that looked good, I checked amazon's prices and usually bought from amazon. Why pay $20 when you can pay $9.99?
My prediction is that ereader and Fictionwise will not last. Price and convenience are the 2 biggest factors in this market, and Amazon is beating everyone. The booksellers should wake up- this market is all about convenience, and customers are not going to pay the same price for an ebook that they would pay for a hardcover.
Make it inconvenient and high priced, and people will obtain their commercial ebooks for free from usenet newsgroups or IRC or various websites like books4s!!! (I won't type in the rest of that s name because the moderator probably won't like it). DRM? Give it up. Most new books can be had in a matter of a few days because high speed scanners exist. Pirates do not need to crack DRM'd books to get their wares.
The booksellers and publishers that want to stay in business will realize these factors and will make it convenient for people to buy from them, and they will price their books accordingly. My guess is that eversions of current books need to be in the $7 range. And hey- if a publisher can make money selling a paperback for that price, they should be able to do it with ebooks.
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