Amazon offers indie authors reward for going exclusive

[ProfCrash]

OK, so BN can sell unDRMED KF8. (winks)

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

Most people with Kindles, and I would assume e-readers in general, are not huge into the independnet author/small press selections... I have no numbers to back up my first statement.

Apparently. You're thinking of Walmart, not Amazon. Easy mistake, I suppose.

It's been well understood for years that Amazon's big advantage over brick & mortar is the "long tail," as in all the niche books that a physical store can't possibly carry. As such, plenty of Amazon customers buy titles that would otherwise be difficult to find.

The reading public also isn't flat or monolithic. Many people only buy 1 or 2 books a year, and usually the best-sellers for reading at the beach. However, an outsize number of books are purchased by a relatively small group, who might buy 10, 15, 20 or more books a year. These are big Amazon customers (due to availability, convenience, Prime etc) and big ebook readers (since they like availability, samples, immediate delivery, convenience etc).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

and wouldn't that give Adobe an illegal monopoly?

Nope. There is always the option to drop DRM.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

OK, so BN can sell unDRMED KF8. (winks)

No, they can't. They can't because the nook doesn't support KF8. It never will. So there's not reason for B&N to switch from ePub. If B&N were to move to KF8, they would be killing their business. Amazon would never allow KF8 to exist on a reader along side ePub. It's not going to happen.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

No, they can't. They can't because the nook doesn't support KF8. It never will. So there's not reason for B&N to switch from ePub. If B&N were to move to KF8, they would be killing their business. Amazon would never allow KF8 to exist on a reader along side ePub. It's not going to happen.

You may want to have your tongue-in-cheek detector serviced. Should be a quick fix—unless it's one of the older models and it's integrated with your general humor-processing circuits.

[ATDrake]

In that hypothetical scenario, B&N needn't switch from ePub. For a long time they still served both DRM eReader and DRM ePub files from their servers, depending on whether or not you were accessing the website direct-downloads using a Mac (this had to do with their old B&N Reader app for Mac having major problems with DRM ePubs) and I don't see why they couldn't just offer you a choice of download formats.

Frankly, I think that MultiFormat bundles are the way for booksellers to go. Let the customer pick what they need to put on their particular reader of the moment, and get whatever they need in the future for whatever the replacement model may be.

But it helps if there isn't DRM on those.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Frankly, I think that MultiFormat bundles are the way for booksellers to go. Let the customer pick what they need to put on their particular reader of the moment, and get whatever they need in the future for whatever the replacement model may be.

But it helps if there isn't DRM on those.

DRM is not necessary an obstacle to that. Eg, Pottermore sells multiformat versions of the Harry Potter books with DRM. The issue arises when people automatically equate "DRM" with "copy protection". There are DRM systems, such as watermarking (which Pottermore uses) which do not restrict copying.