Comments on: Charlie Stross on Sony Reader, death of the PDA http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/charlie-stross-on-sony-reader-death-of-the-pda/ News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:05:45 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Brian Carnell http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/charlie-stross-on-sony-reader-death-of-the-pda/comment-page-1/#comment-991262 Brian Carnell Thu, 25 Dec 2008 03:46:51 +0000 http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/12/24/charlie-stross-on-sony-reader-death-of-the-pda/#comment-991262 I was kind of surprised at Stross' argument about e-book pricing (not that I necessarily agree with the idea that e-book prices should necessarily be lower than p-book prices). For example, "Finally, publishers don't sell direct to the public, any more than you buy CDs direct from Warner or Sony: they sell into ebook storefronts like eReader or Fictionwise or the Kindle store, all of whom demand a gigantic cut of the cover price." Um, yeah, currently they operate this way but there's no reason they couldn't sell directly to customers. After all the most successful ebook publisher in the scifi genre -- Baen -- does exactly this and appears to be doing so with quite a bit of success. I was kind of surprised at Stross’ argument about e-book pricing (not that I necessarily agree with the idea that e-book prices should necessarily be lower than p-book prices).

For example, “Finally, publishers don’t sell direct to the public, any more than you buy CDs direct from Warner or Sony: they sell into ebook storefronts like eReader or Fictionwise or the Kindle store, all of whom demand a gigantic cut of the cover price.”

Um, yeah, currently they operate this way but there’s no reason they couldn’t sell directly to customers. After all the most successful ebook publisher in the scifi genre — Baen — does exactly this and appears to be doing so with quite a bit of success.

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