Quote:
Originally Posted by jbcohen
Someone correct me if I am wrong but I believe the issue here is that some readers are tied to a specific company such as a kindle...
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I believe that the Kindle is the only e-reader that's actually tied to a specific company, in that you have to email your own documents to an address at Amazon to have them loaded, and I'm not even sure about that. Maybe you can just hook up a cable, like you can with all the rest. (Kindle owners, help?) Just about every other device on the planet, though, you can hook a cable to and transfer your books, wherever they may be from. Most of them nowadays look like just another drive to your computer, too; you can just copy the books onto that drive, in the proper place of course, and there they are. And of course we calibre users just pick "send to device" and calibre does all the heavy lifting.
Taking my Sony as an example, I've never bought a book from the Sony online bookstore. I haven't had their software loaded since I discovered calibre, which was not long after I bought my 505. I recognize in principle that there are people who do buy all their books through Sony, but I don't buy that category of books (DRM-restricted books, to be exact) so I'm not one of them. On the other hand, I've bought a fair number of books and stories from authors on MobileRead (I was the one who first proposed the "self-promotion" forum, and there are times I regret it!), some through Smashwords, some from their own websites. Again, the Sony software doesn't come into it, nor does any linkage to Sony's overpriced, DRM-encumbered, dubiously-formatted, and generally execrable store.
So I think there needs to be a distinction between devices absolutely locked to a given vendor (possibly the Kindle), devices whose vendors have bookstores but which can use other book sources (PRS, nook), and devices which have no store at all (a lot). The first category contains either one or zero devices, and I think it's zero. If that is the case, and no device is irrevocably locked to its store, then no device
requires an ISBN.
As an example of the latter case, I bought a story (Firemaggot) from Barbara Hambly a while back. It's quite a good story, by the way. She sells it (and others) directly from her website. There is no publisher, no ISBN, no bookstore limitation -- you just go to her site and buy the story.
In the case of the articles, and wanting to sell them through bookstores that require ISBNs, perhaps bundle them into books? Would a customer buy ten related articles at one time? I can't speculate fully effectively without knowing the subject of the articles, but let's say they're about houseplants (on my mind since I just watered the orchids): would someone who originally intended to buy just an article on the types of cyclamen also be interested in one on propagation of African violets, and maybe one on dwarf Sinningias? If so, not only might that work, but it might produce more revenue than selling the articles singly. Say that cyclamen customer might have intended to buy one article for $1, but if there were ten articles bundled together for $5, and two or three of those were of some interest (the others, to that customer who doesn't grow those plants, being dross) the customer would pay $5 instead of $1-$3.