Responding to Richard and to anamardoll.
Borrows are free, but Prime members are limited to one per month. The author receives, currently, about $1.60-1.70 per borrow.
So each borrow is as likely to be read as a sale, IMO. As opposed to the many downloads that result when people put their book up for free for 1-5 days (which you can do with the Select program), which do indeed just sit on devices, I suspect. Lots and lots of downloads, but I don't know how many actual reads. Sales typically get a brief bump after a free period. Sometimes it sticks, sometimes not.
My promotion to B&N was equal as much as possible to my promotion to Amazon. Once I went exclusive with Amazon, of course, that promotion ceased.
Josh Strnad...nope, not me. There's a bunch of us Strnads around, including another one named "Jan Strnad" who was associated somehow with Star Trek: The Next Generation. My friends assumed that it was me (and that the "Strnad Nebula" in that show was named after me) but it was the other Jan Strnad, unfortunately.
My point about the DRM is that epub is losing the format war, not because it's an inferior format, but because its adherents saddled it with incompatible DRM that meant that, for instance, you couldn't read an ebook purchased at B&N on your Kobo. The big advantage of "any ebook on any device" that epub had, disappeared because the epub retailers were busy competing with one another when they should have banded together to compete with Amazon.
So, as Amazon continues its juggernaut path to ebook domination...well, it's like watching your favorite team (B&N, Sony, Kobo) lose to the team you hate because they played lousy.
I much prefer any ebook from any retailer on any device, but it doesn't seem to be working out that way whichever format wins. I'm really very sad about this, and also sometimes angry, but I have to make solid business decisions.
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