[Harmon]

I downloaded a copy of Dracula from the Sony/Borders Google Books section. It is a poorly formatted book. Gobbledygook on about every third page, interpolations of what must be the original photoscan of the volume. Now, there are a few cheapish versions on the S/B store, but not a word about the formatting. Nothing to tell me if they are text or pdf or epub or lrf. Nothing suggesting that the formatting is any better than the free version. In other words, the publishers don't seem to know what it is that they are selling. They think it's the content of the book, but don't seem to grasp that the content of this particular book is free.

So I am trudging along with the free version because I have no reason to believe that the other versions are any better.

The point is this: I don't think that what the booksellers are selling is content anymore, if it ever was. What they are selling is a number of services surrounding content. It used to be that the main service they were selling was Access, but with the internet, everything eventually becomes accessible. What booksellers need to be selling is Quality, Immediacy, Hassle Free. And they need to figure out how to price those services.

In the print environment, Amazon started selling some of the services, but not all of them. Successful bookstores are ones which sell what Amazon can't - and books themselves are not that product. Immediacy could be one. (I keep waiting for a bookstore that delivers books like pizza - call them up, and a guy in a car or on a bike delivers the book within the next hour.) Browsing is another such service, although Amazon is taking a bite at that.

For electronic books, it's going to be the same. The peculiar thing is that Amazon doesn't see that, or maybe they do but the publishers are too skittish.

"Piracy" is an illusion. The assumption that the download of a pirated book is a lost sale is just that - an assumption. An assumption more likely to be true is that a free book can be a hook into the sale of the next book. Another better assumption is that an intelligently priced and marketed book will move better than a pirated version.

Literate people do not want to pirate ebooks. They do, however, want to have them quickly, hassle free, well formatted, and at what they see as a fair price. Right now, pirated books deliver that complex of value better than publishers do. It's not that the pirates do it well, but rather, that the publishers don't seem to want to do it at all.