I feel the same about ebook readers, which Is why I have yet to buy one. Unless ebook readers come out with the programming necessary to read as many formats as possible, I will continue to use a computer to read ebooks.

Making proprietary ebook formats with ebook readers designed only to read that type is stupid. The businessmen/women responsible for pushing single format readers are trying to corner a market when the market should not be cornered. The market needs to expand. If they let it expand, they’d have more sales right away, of both ebooks and hardware designed to read them.

Okay, that’s funny.

I have a Nokia 770, and I’m not entirely happy with any of the options available for it, but I haven’t explored FBreader beyond installing and opening a file in it as yet. Your upper limit is why you should come visit us. $7.95 is the highest price on our site. Of course, we’re just getting started, so that sparse offering you’ve mentioned goes doubly for us. Booksforabuck.com has been around much longer, though and has a much wider selection.

Prison rape.

The only e-books I buy are non-DRM because I have too many different devices to support, and the majority of these are from Baen in MS LIT format–because I can explode those into OEBPS which FBreader likes. I tend not to deal with PDF ebooks because PDF rendering can be iffy on some platforms, and the lack of reflow is a complete pain on my N800.

Unfortunately, I don’t only want to read militaristic masturbation all the time (which limits Baen’s appeal; what happened to speculative fiction that was *more* than just a pissing contenst on who can describe the tissue rending properties of a high velocity round?) and Fictionwise’s non-DRM offerings are a little sparse and often even more expensive–Baen’s $6 is the upper bound for me.

– C

Cerberus, our printer requires a PDF, but formatted slightly differently than an e-book PDF. Mobipocket has proprietary code; Palm has proprietary code; Microsoft Reader has proprietary code. We start with the same basic file for each, but each has to be edited at least a little by hand. It’s not hard, but it does take time. Either way, I wouldn’t call $3.60 to pay everyone responsible for putting out a book “rape.” If you think it is, what do you call what the big printers are doing with their e-book pricing?

Rob, thanks. I’ve learned a lot from your comments on this blog and elsewhere.

I have to wonder how much distribution really matters to ebooks in an age where any old Joe could put up a blog and a paypal link.

Robert, it wouldn’t matter if you could be sure that a large enough number of people would find your blog and remember to stop back regularly. E-book readers know they can find a lot of great books at Fictionwise or Mobipocket from a variety of publishers, so for now, it matters.

Cerebus: bigger publishers can afford turnkey server-based publishing solutions with sophisticated workflows. Smaller publishers are still learning and improvising. It’s not merely a matter of providing a single sourcing solution; it’s a matter of having a solution which allows input from multiple workers and complex workflows. Still, it seems counterproductive to focus on PDF as an output format.

I have to wonder how much distribution really matters to ebooks in an age where any old Joe could put up a blog and a paypal link.

Print economics for small publishers is pretty grim. One of the reason there are as many small publishers as there are is because ePublishing allows us to make a few pennies when we sell books.

I think many not in the industry don’t realize how little the big publishers pay for printing (per book–they pay a lot overall, but spread that over many thousands of books). Their cost for a trade paperback, for example, is close to nothing and their cost for eBooks is close to nothing so why shouldn’t they price them the same. For small publishers, like Drollerie and BooksForABuck.com, our costs for paper are high–which is why we offer significant discounts for electronic copies.

I’ve mentioned this in previous posts so I’ll just recap. If you’re a big publisher, you live or die by distribution. If the big bookstores (Barnes and Noble, Borders, BooksAMillion) get pissed because you are undercutting them, they’ll buy fewer copies of your books and your revenue drops. They’re caught in the transition. A good reason to shop small publishers, no?

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

Call me obtuse, but if you’re not formatting into a parent format and *generating* the particular reader format, I think you deserve to lose the money. Format conversions are relatively easy, especially when given a well-documented starting markup.

Heck, I’m willing to bet your printer is only accepting electronic formats as well. That means you can transform to the printer format *from the same parent format as the e-books*.

Total cost after recouping software development: near $0. And development cost could be very low because this is a perfect project for cross-publisher collaboration on an open source solution, similar to how the banking industry handles financial middleware. Each publisher pays a fraction of the development cost but reaps the benefit of the complete solution.

Don’t rape me on cost just because you haven’t figured that out.

– C