[sourcejedi]

Originally Posted by Algiedi

My bad, I never know which terms to use (especially in English). Let's just say "anyone trying to make money out of ebooks that's not a pirate".

Sorry, that wasn't really meant as a criticism. I was just trying to avoid digressions into what a publisher is, and whether it meant the same as your word. I don't think we have a problem there .

Well I was thinking about a lot of goodies but they could get pirated as well unless one uses "streaming-only-from-a-verified-copy-of-the-book" unpleasantness.

Yeah, that's where I'm coming from.

Those gimmicks can be things that people do want but never think of the official source as a provider of it (c'mon Amazon, gimme a mobi-Sigil) or artificially create the need for silly gizmos (god knows our life is full enough of those already to prove that point).

Hmm, maybe I'm being unimaginatively pessimistic here. But all these gizmos are things e.g. Amazon would have to implement, not the publisher.

You're saying publishers should out-compete copyright infringement, by bundling additional services (and loyalty rewards) that make people feel really good about paying for ebooks.

My caveat to that would be that if they try to invest in this, their first competitor won't be copyright infringement; it'll be Amazon.

There's a point that the big publishers have actually started looking at this now, and their main aim in competing with Amazon is probably not to take the 30% margin for themselves, but to start their own experiments and hopefully raise the bar, because they fear Amazon would otherwise become complacent and/or they think they can provide strengths Amazon lacks.

But it doesn't look like they're going to sell anything fancier than the Sony store does (I presume they'll use ADE); they just want to provide a better service for discovering books you'd like to read (and then make it as easy as possible to buy them).

[They're not even "selling" recommendations. They're explicitly not focussing on automatically analyzing your purchases to provide suggestions, without you having to bother telling it what books you already like, because Amazon do that already].

I think it's very interesting, and they're focusing on the sort of thing they can do well. A bit like Tor.com (Tor is a publisher, but they run a blog which is ostensibly a general science fiction site, including regular stuff on TV shows, for example).

I'm not convinced they should be investing much more heavily in reader software or retail deals. Some of them did try to in the past, but the few efforts that are actually succeeding now were (AFAIK) all driven by independent technology and/or retail companies.

If they're independent, they can fail independently . Provided there's competition, you can allow individual experiments to fail without having an individual publisher get dragged down by that failure.

maybe it's just my "what would Valve do?" reflex.

The same as Amazon?

EDIT: oh yeah and another current thread's talking about it: subscription model.

Graar, why'd you have to bring up something complicated like that . [It breaks my last point, because you really want significant publisher cooperation, to offer what is effectively a bulk discount]. Maybe that's the answer. I don't know what to say about it, other than at least it's more honest about the presence of lock-in. (No point pirating / looking at this other store; I've already paid my money so I'd better use my subscription service).