Brick-and-mortar stores can sell e-books under the Symtio system. Zondervan, the Christian publisher, a HarperCollins imprint, is blazing the way.
Here’s how Symtio works. A customers buys a plastic card in the store, goes online for a book or audio, keys in a number, then buys the ePub or MP3. The latter will work on Sony Readers but not Kindles. See video and news release.
Who knows? Maybe this will hook a few p-book shoppers. Still, one wonders what happens when they go E in a bigger way and learn to browse and download their choices immediately.
In a sense, the Symtio approach is a print-on-demand in reverse—e-go-home-first.
(Via Sam Hendrix and DearAuthor.)
