Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Herley
Agreed -- which begs the question, "What is the point of Waterstone's?" as far as ebooks are concerned. Waterstone's has a chain of physical bookstores for selling physical books: their middle-man position there is understandable.
Moreover, publishers themselves are terrified of the coming ebook revolution, especially for fiction. Their two principal (and largely indispensable) activities are promotion and distribution. The net takes care of the latter; and I must say I have not noticed overmuch promotion of ebooks by the big publishing houses. This begs a second question, much like the first ...
|
a similar question can be asked about Borders in the USA. It is also a chain book store that sells the Sony reader. I suspect they are looking at long term survival and see eBooks as a significant portion of the future. Certainly pBooks will be around but people want choices so why not. I suspect the one thing that hasn't really happened yet is the eBook portion of the offering.
I envision Kiosks will appear in retail stores that can be used to purchase eBooks for your device much like Kiosks have appeared for digital cameras to make traditional paper copies of your pictures. A Kiosk would be a perfect solution providing the ability to sell eBooks and then directly load them on your device, or perhaps an SD card that can be subsequently plugged into your device.
These are likely to appear in bookstores and retail stores that sell eBook readers. You can only sell the reader once but to get ongoing customer sales you need to be able to sell eBooks.
Dale