Quote:
Originally Posted by braver
Hellmark -- are you a publisher or do you have publishing interests? You're consistently falling on the publishers' side, which, I believe, is not the majority side here.
The majority side are the new consumers of ebooks. And as a group, we have a new interest in digital upgrade.
Sure it's inconvenient for the status quo. My analogy is with the human rights in the US. You'd have to desegregate a lot of schools and buses, and eliminate a lot of signs, retrain the police and civil servants. It is inconvenient indeed -- but necessary.
Amazon has exact and perfect way to immediately and for all time verify Joe Schmoe's purchase of a specific book by a specific publisher. Depending on the structure of digital rights, this MAY give Amazon a WAY to OFFER a discount to Joe as a way to reward and retain Joe as a customer.
Now add market forces into the mix, and you get -- inevitability.
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braver --
I'm not Hellmark, but my post is what he was agreeing with a moment ago. I'm also a publisher (a tiny, specialty one). And yes, of course publishers are in the minority -- here and in most venues.
However, I'm also an ebook consumer. I'm not really too sure which group is smaller at the moment!
I completely agree that Amazon has the capability to identify whether or not a given customer has or has not purchased a book from them. I don't think anybody's been arguing that point. I also sympathize that your position has been misperceived as asking for the e-versions for free when you're actually willing to pay something for them.
That said, what you want does require a fair bit of effort and negotiation. My own suggestion is in some ways simpler as it ignores completely the issues of verification of ownership and making the retailer persuade/coerce many separate publishers into giving a big discount.
In some ways, I think that you're getting frustrated by the responses you get in this thread because you can't see why more people don't agree with you. It seems to me that there are some big underlying reasons for that:
(a) A lot of folks on this forum are the hard-core early adopters who stopped buying printed books awhile ago. The Amazon proposal wouldn't help many of them.
(b) The "e-book" Amazon would provide would be a proprietary Kindle-only format. Outside of the US, that doesn't help many of the folks here.
(c) Going with (b) again, not everybody who has an e-reader owns a kindle. I don't, for example. So to the extent that Amazon is involved, it really doesn't help me.
For reasons (b-c) above, I think you'd be much more successful trying to rile up people here to push Amazon to sell the Kindle worldwide and give up the Kindle-only ebook model.
For what it's worth, I do think you're onto something, but it's much more likely to happen (if it does at all) by showing the publishers and retailers where the profit is, rather than by threatening them or comparing this issue to human rights!
Also, despite examples of bad behavior, do we really have to assume that publishers and consumers are on opposite "sides"? Any more so than consumers and any other producer or service provider, like farmers, teachers, or writers? Personally, I want to make a product that people like/enjoy/want enough to spend their money on. Our interests are not perfectly aligned, but it's not as simple as opposing sides, either.