[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by ficbot

1) Their goal is pretty much world ebook domination, with software for every device available in any market everywhere, and content from the major publishers plus local ones wherever they can get deals. They are therefore much more customer service oriented than some other retailers I ave dealt with *cough* fictionwise *cough*

Are they planning on ever carrying non-DRM'd ebooks? (I suppose probably not; they'd have to explain the differences, and they don't seem to be set up to do that. As it is, they don't clearly state what format the "mobile" files are.)

2) He told me to expect it to take 'a couple months' for the agency mess to sort itself out, but not to panic. He said they have already received numerous emails from content partners with price changes just in the last few days---in other words, requests to lower a price. The publishers are basically lemmings who see what the other ones are doing, freak out that they are not doing it, and copy.

And I expect that to be *endless* fun to watch. Like a multi-line trainwreck. Because publishers really don't have the business mechanisms set up to watch the day-to-day market and take advantage of small shifts in public preferences, so they're going to be playing catch-up with each others' promotions and bargains.

I am very much looking forward to the opportunity for small publishers to jump heavily into the ebook market with $5-10 non-DRM'd ebooks and the ability to say, "we'll work with you to make sure this is readable on your device, whatever that is!" Small publishers are flexible enough to assign people to ebook customer service; big publishers are still trying to treat them like pbooks: if you've got a problem, go back to the store that sold it to you and deal with their refund policy.

There is no conspiracy to sabotage the e-market. They just have no idea what they're doing.

I don't think there's a conscious conspiracy, but there are attempts to keep the current/previous publishing model (complete with the ~50% returned book rates) as long as possible, and treat ebooks as an entirely *additional* revenue source, unrelated to previous markets. They don't want to allow ebooks to affect print sales, and they don't know how to prevent it other than keeping the prices high enough that nobody chooses ebook over print because of price.