Moderator: See earlier item on e-book pricing. Unrelated: Rob's test of BookGlutton's ePub conversion. Try it yourself. - D.R. Sometimes you can't win for losing. E-books get dinged for being "too expensive." But offer great books at super-affordable prices instead---and you might get attacked for that. Pricing is one of the most controversial aspects of e-books. When I started BooksForABuck.com, my market research indicated that many e-book publishers had set price points above those charged by traditional publishers for paper books. I love e-books and can understand charging more for the portability, adjustable font, and convenience. The problem is, you have...

Moderator: Writer Rob Preece isn't just owner of BooksForABuck---he's also a former senior economist for the FCC. - D.R. With all due respect to Gerry Faulhaber, copyright is not dead. In fact, copyright is a part of the intellectual property revolution that is perhaps the most important aspect of the new economic model currently emerging (no, I'm not talking about investment bank bailouts). Specifically, what we buy and consume has ever-increasing value-add in intellectual property and ever-decreasing value-add in raw materials and manufacturing despite the recent run-up in commodity pricing. The glories of copyright Copyright...

Moderator's note: Will e-books really help the typical reader save money? Here are some Kindle-related thoughts from Rob Preece, owner of BooksForABuck.com---trained as an economist. - DR First, you've got to assume a useful life---and consider the discount rate. I'm going to assume your e-book reader lasts three years and ignore the discount rate, which is about comparing a buck spent now with a buck saved in a couple of years. For most of us saving a dollar a couple of years from now is not as valuable as saving a dollar now. Let's assume you buy your Kindle...

Moderator's note: Photo is of Maxwell Perkins, who, as an editor for Charles Scribner's Sons, added value to the works of such immortals as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. - DR I'm as fond of free books as anyone. Project Gutenberg is a wonderful service, and I am grateful for all of the volunteers and contributors who've made this resource possible. So many great works of the past were either inaccessible or available only in high-cost collectible books until Gutenberg began its epic construction of the new universal library. The glories of the weed-out That said, I'm also a publisher. It's...

When plugging e-books, I run into a recurring objection---something like this: "But I just like the look of books on my shelves or on my coffee table." This isn't just me. SF author Steve Jordan got dozens of similar comments when he pitched Read an eBook Week at Chronicles Science Fiction Forums. It's tempting to reject the objections as a sort of a book fetish, and in fact, that's not all wrong. How many books are bought not to read but to display? I don't think anyone knows the answer to this, but I suspect that David McCllough's John Adams and...

Moderator's note: We're pleased to welcome Rob Preece as a regular TeleBlog contributor. I haven't always agreed with his comments on others' posts, but I've enjoyed them, and as a publisher and bookstore operator, he'll offer his own special perspective. - David Rothman I discovered e-books as the ideal mix of my love for books and my one-time career in technology. Because I read and write science fiction, mystery, fantasy, and romance, I opened the small electronic publisher, BooksForABuck.com, specifically to address these genres of fiction. I believe that e-publishing offers the opportunity to expand the reading audience, so I've made...