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Adventures in E-Book Shopping, a horror story found at Publishing Central, tells it all:

A recent attempt to purchase an ebook illustrates the danger electronic publishers face if they don’t make it easier to purchase the ebooks they sell.

In her article, Wendy J. Woudstra concludes:

What lessons are there to be learned from this shopping excursion? Ebook retailers and publishers must make it easier to to purchase ebooks in the reader’s preferred format–whatever that format may be. As long as it’s easier to steal an ebook from a file sharing network than it is to buy it from a bookstore, the publishing industry will be in the same hot water as the recording industry has been for the last several years.

Read Ms. Woudstra’s article, and you may be reminded of a common pattern in these stories. Many frustrated shoppers end up using the Palm Digital Media format–often because of prices or greater convenience. It’s a lesson for the rest of the industry. The best solution would be a mix of lower prices, a universal consumer format, more cluefulness on the downside of DRM, and eventually a TeleRead-style library system to make e-books a more serious medium. But there is plenty that e-book companies can do even now in terms of prices and convenience.

 
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