Thank you!

Smashwords certainly has its problems – not many big names, the amount of sheer crud available – but a look at the topsellers will give you an idea of the better quality ebooks available. And published authors do seem to be slowly taking advantage of Smashwords – I’ve noticed a few old favourites appearing.

You figure it out, authors/publishers/retailers. If I like your solution I’ll buy e-books. If I don’t like your solution I won’t. It’s not my responsibility to answer your problems. I’ve got the disposable income and the (ever shrinking) free time. You want them. It’s up to you to figure out how to get them.

- go to amazon.com, amazon.ca, amazon.co.uk, etc. etc.
- find a book I like
- order it (sometimes paying more for shipping, which is fine)
- read it
- if I move to another country the book can be taken with me no problem
- I can also go to a library and read any number of books for free, lend them to my friends, give them to the thrift store.

with ebooks instead I have to

- decide among a series of incompatible devices (and often not on merit, but on book availability for them)
- go to the device’s store (say, amazon.ca)
- ONLY buy books from amazon.ca, not .com, not .co.uk, for some reason some books are available in one but not the others
- read the book (hoping the drm won’t cause issues)
- wonder about what will happen 5 years down the road if I move to another country (will I lose access to my books?) or if the device I bought will not be supported anymore etc. etc.
- no such thing as a library, can’t lend books (or maybe once in case I AND my friends have a specific device), can’t resell/give them away permanently

why is it that as soon as a good becomes electronic a lot of restrictions not present on the physical form of that good come up? Why is it that I can import a book on paper but not online?

Why is it that people that pirate everything couldn’t care less about any of this but honest people have to jump through hoops and sometimes end up being burned because they supported the ‘wrong’ device?

I have been on the fence of buying a kindle for quite some time now, but all of the above keeps me still firmly in the paper world, which sucks because I’d love to have my library in my backpack at all times, and I’d love to support the authors I love by re-buying their books once again (hopefully for the final time), but I won’t be taken advantage of by companies/entities who don’t seem to care at all about me as a consumer, and that will probably just see their low sales as caused by ‘piracy’ vs by ‘not being able to provide what the consumers want’.

The consumer wants:

- an interoperable format so no matter what device you own you can read things on it
- an easy way to buy books, no drm, because the only people affected by drm are legitimate customers
- the end of these ‘geographical restrictions’, we are in a global society, not in the middle ages

we’ll see if anybody will ever provide this at any point: but given what’s happened with music and movies I am not holding my breath.

http://americaneditor.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/hall-of-shame-an-introduction/

It is interesting that I used to think that all the formatting errors and typos were okay (a new technology and all that) if I was getting a good deal on the ebook.

Now that prices are going up I’ll be much less forgiving of the poor quality of practically every ebook I read (about 15 a month). As customers we need to come up with more ways to demand the publishers produce higher-quality ebooks. I always appreciate when others note poor ebook formatting in their Amazon book reviews.

The way I see it, *if* ebooks really take off, most authors with even a moderate fan base will take that with them as they move away from the starvation wages they are paid now and use something like Amazon where under the new terms they make about the same on a 3.99$ ebook like on a 25$ hardcover, while new authors will try either pay their dues in the old system until they can go on their own or maybe a new structure that will allow them to do that from the beginning will appear…

The big publishers dilemma is that without ebooks they hemorrhage slowly against the competition which today is all content including blogs and such, with ebooks too popular they die faster, so they need to find an adoption rate that is *just right* – tricky and unlikely they will pull it out