Quote:
Originally Posted by thrawn_aj
You're arguing about the wrong thing. I never said anything about the universality of the "no DRM" demand, merely that the people who DO shop at Baen do so primarily for the unencumbered formats and the variety of the formats available and only secondly (but a close second to be sure) for the low prices. That doesn't easily extrapolate to Smashwords and Amazon (and by the way, do we actually know the numbers for the two? Do we also know that after allowing for relative sizes and market penetration, there actually IS an imbalance between Smashwords and Amazon sales?) You do realize that Amazon is a retailing giant - very few online retailers (or offline for that matter) can compete with it. Smashwords is relatively new and rather small (Baen has been around for a long time as a publisher and as a retailer), all things considered - it will be a while yet before they can start matching the resident retailing Goliath.
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I don't think they ever will, and neither will Smashwords. I've seen people who have posted about their SW versus Amazon sales and Amazon outsells at a factor of 10. If/when ebooks become mainstream, the masses will turn to a company they recognise for their content. Most will never even stray from the company they bought their reader from.