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Selling directly works well for houses that have a clearly-defined genre (e.g. Baen) or for authors or small groups of authors (e.g. Closed Circle), as the customers know clearly where to go.
If the big publishers sold directly you would need to know which house sold the book you were looking for, or you would need the catalogue exposed to good search tools, or the big publishers would need to set up an aggregate site - effectively to act as their own agents.
Exposing the catalogue to a general search would make sense, but wouldn't this be easier using the web rather than specific apps?
Regarding iBookstore, aren't they selling through that already? Or do you mean that Apple could licence the iBookstore app to produce cloned versions for the big publishers?
Graham
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