An e-book shop will open on Dec. 1 for Australia —Read without Paper—and will sell both international and local authors. Supposedly prices will be comparable to those of U.S.-based stores: let’s see.
The publicity says that “Over 110,000 Fiction & Non-Fiction Titles” will be be available, including books from “Stephanie Meyer, Dan Brown, James Patterson, Dean Koontz, Nora Roberts and many more.” It will also feature top Australian and New Zealand writers such as Colleen McCullough, Kerry Greenwood, Michael Faber, Nick Cave, Tom Collins, James Clavell, Thomas Keneally and Kathy Lette.
Formats will be Adobe-DRMed ePub, Adobe PDF, and audiobooks in OverDrive MP3 & WMA formats.
“All prices” will be “quoted in Australian dollars” and there’ll be a “special offer” of “20% off the price of all titles until 31st December 2009.”
This will not be the only e-book store out of Australia—eBooks.com is a major operation that has been around for years.
Australia is also the land of the recently introduced Eco Reader, shown here and destined for sale via the Read without Paper store.
Meanwhile a U.S.-based store, Ebooksabouteverything.com, is apparently gone—at least if you go by the current redirect to Diesel eBooks. The vanished store, as I recall, used a Google-centric approach based on search words and subject-related domain names.
I’m curious if it could have succeeded with something else: more of a community approach. In today’s competitive environment, search words and domain names alone won’t do the trick.
Might that be the real lesson for Ebooksabouteverything not being online anymore? I’d love to here from people more familiar with Ebooksabouteveryting to see what we can learn here. Perhaps there are factors I don’t know about.
(Via MobileRead.)
