Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Strnad
Amazon needs to get over its obsession with exclusivity. They've created "Kindle for PC" for every conceivable device except the thing you most want to read on...your non-Kindle reader. If every reading device on the market could display Amazon books, they would sell more books. If the Kindle could read ePub files, they'd sell more Kindles. What does Amazon want to sell, Kindles or books?
As long as the Agency 5 publishers insist on DRM, those authors who own their own stuff and are willing, even eager, to issue it DRM-free on multiple platforms...well, that's one teeny-tiny thing in our favor. If Amazon, B&N, and the publishers wised up and opened up, that one teeny-tiny advantage would disappear. But still, the whole industry would be much bigger and my itsy-bitsy piece of it would be bigger, too, maybe.
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I have to disagree with your first point. Amazon developed kindle software for the iPad, and that has been great for iPad users. Development is a lot of work, and expecting amazon to develop software for every reader out there is unrealistic. I am not familiar, from a programming standpoint, what is necessary to do to display kindle ebooks. But if amazon releases all relevant information on the ebook format so that developers can write programs to display that format, that should be enough. If encryption is involved and their algorithms are secret, then binary libraries could be released for different environments.
DRM really sucks, and I see little benefit in it. Consider that almost every book published can be found a few weeks after release on pirate sites in image .PDF format, what is the sense anyways? Fast scanners have made conversion into .pdf's easy and very fast. All DRM does is piss off paying customers.
Convenience and pricing are the two big factors in the ebook market. Make it easy for customers to get books onto their readers, and price those books fairly- say for the same price as a paperback book, and people will buy. Price them at the same price as a hardcover book, and it will piss people off and they will not buy.
Amazon has made a good start with 3G service and 9.99 pricing. Those factors alone remove much of the incentive for people to pirate. There have been some encouraging signs recently that publishers might be pulling their heads out of their rear ends, too. Recently I bout 10 or so books on iPhone programming from various publishers. Average price $40 or so in paper versions. Checked on kindle store and saw the prices were almost the same for a kindle version. Stupid, very stupid. But I checked on a couple of these books a week ago, and found that the kindle version was about $17 for each. If these publishers would wake up and price realistically, they would sell a lot more ebooks.