Selling e-Books

dabbler — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:53:10 +0000

Been watching from afar as C.J. Cherryh, Jane Fancher, and Lynn Abbey have been setting up an e-Book Store, called Closed Circle, for selling their no-longer-in-print books. It should be opening as I write this, and I'll be over there shortly. If I could replace all of my CJ books with electronic editions, I'd gain an entire shelf for other folks' paper copies. Seems like a real good deal to me.

The technical issues have been interesting. Apparently Jane and Lynn have been doing most of the website work (looks a lot like it's been mostly Jane, since Lynn's been injured), while CJ has been working out the mechanics of getting the books into an acceptable format. She put up a sample book--an excerpt from her old blog, as it happens--a couple weeks ago, and asked for reactions. Those have been interesting, and it's clear she learned things from the trial.

Things will evidently work as follows: You'll get a link to a ZIP file containing either three or eleven files (which version depends on a selection at purchase, apparently). The smaller version will contain the book in the three most common e-book formats; the larger version will also include eight less common formats. (Obviously the format translations are technically easy for her. And, just as obviously, there's a effort tradeoff at the "stock the shelves" step related to the number of versions the store offers.) Cherryh recommends loading your purchase into either calibre or mobipocket (both are free; I've used calibre) for reading--or for transfer into a dedicated e-book reader, like an Amazon Kindle or a Sony Touch.

So:

Download and install software.
Purchase the book.
Download it.
UnZIP it.
Select the correct version using the reader software you've selected.
Make sure it's readable.
Attach your e-book reader (presumably via USB).
Transfer the file to the e-book reader.

I see lots of points of failure. Baen's Webscriptions site moves the Selection step to the purchase point, and makes the UnZIP step voluntary. That's a bit better, but both stores, to my mind, assume too much technical literacy on the part of their customers. Obviously that's what Amazon's Whispernet is intended to address.

The store I help run as part of my job delivers documents (not books) in PDF format, and we spend lots of time doing what amounts to remote technical support. I'm guessing Closed Circle might find it advantageous to move their design in Baen's direction.

Wish List

dabbler — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:36:22 +0000

Joan bought me a Sony Touch for Christmas. This is an ideological choice--basically, I believe we need competition in this market. I plan to pass along some notes about the Reader in the future (Joan's got a Kindle, so I can do comparisons), but today let's discuss the Sony eBook Store.

Down the page you'll find a list of the books which were on my Amazon Wish List when I started this little project. A short summary of the information:

64 books.
62 are currently available as new paper books on Amazon (one of the other two is out of print; the other's not yet published.)
19 of those books are available for purchase in the Kindle store.
- All but one of the 19 are cheaper than the paper version (the exception has the same price for both media).
12 of those books are available for purchase in the Sony store.
- Two are cheaper than the paper version. (In both cases, they match the Kindle price.)
Two were available for free from Google Books, so the Wish List has since changed.

Both eBook stores have serious deficiencies. The selection is just plain unsatisfactory if you're serious about books. But Sony seems not to understand basic pricing strategies. It's a good thing I didn't expect to make much use of their store. I'll mostly be finding my reading material elsewhere, something I knew before I asked for the Reader.

As long as I'm discussing Wish Lists: Sony's store lets me create one, but doesn't seem to have a method for sharing it. Again, I think they've completely missed the point.

Here's the list (sorted newest to oldest--Bicycling Science has been on the list for over four years). Feel free to reach your own conclusions.

Title	Author	Amazon	Kindle	Sony	note
What Distant Deeps	David Drake				not yet published
The Miracle has Landed	Matthew Silverman	$16.47
Asylum for the Insane	William Decker	$31.50
Beating Around the Bushes	Tim Sommer	$15.95
Report from Engine Co. 82	Dennis Smith	$10.08	$9.99
The Past has Another Pattern	George Ball	$24.75
A Soldier Reports	William Westmoreland				Amazon has it used
America's Longest War	George Herring	$31.72
History of the Express Companies	A.L. Stimson	$33.40			free from Google Books
LeMay	Warren Kozak	$18.45	$14.76	$19.56
The Cherryh Odyssey	Edward Carmien	$19.95
His Majesty's Ship	Alaric Bond	$17.05
Inventing Wyatt Earp	Allen Barra	$14.96
A Handbook of Statistical Analysis Using R	Brian Everitt	$37.08			Sony has his Stata book
Three Men in a Boat	John Jerome	$5.95	$0.99	$0.99	free from Google Books
Society for American Baseball Research	Turner Publishing/SABR	$38.65
Names on the Land	George Stewart	$13.57
Lost for Words	Lynda Mugglesworth	$24.00
The Jacksonian Economy	Peter Temin	$18.13
Andrew Jackson and the Bank War	Robert Remini	$13.44
The Rise of American Democracy	Sean Wilentz	$13.57
Chants Democratic	Sean Wilentz	$24.95
Andrew Jackson	Sean Wilentz	$14.96	$11.97	$15.40
What Hath God Wrought	Daniel Walker Howe	$23.10	$10.86	$18.38
Shop Class as Soulcraft	Matthew Crawford	$17.13	$9.99	$9.99
Slayer Slang	Michael Adams	$17.09
The Plot Against Pepys	James Long	$20.40
Metropolitan Government and Governance	G Ross Stephens	$42.00
The View from the Masthead	Hester Blum	$43.16
As They See 'Em	Bruce Weber	$17.16	$13.73
Conspirator	CJ Cherryh	$17.13
Elsewhere, USA	Dalton Conley	$16.32	$13.06
The Fielding Bible	John Dewan	$16.29
Bill James Gold Mine 2009	Bill James	$16.29
Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball	Dock Ellis	$20.65
High and Inside	Lou Gorman	$29.95
John Evelyn	Gillian Darley	$42.00
The Mythical Man-Month	Frederick Brooks	$25.80	$19.24
Authority and Disorder in Victorian Times	Paul Thomas	$15.99
The Almanac of American Politics 2008	Michael Barone	$47.22			nor do they have the other editions
Citizens of the World	David Hancock	$37.57
The Shaping of America vol 3	DW Meinig	$32.50
Home Before Morning	Linda Van Devanter	$17.96
A History of Money and Banking in the United States	Murray Rothbard	$19.00
Capital Ideas Evolving	Peter Bernstein	$19.77	$9.22	$20.96
Dealers of Lightning	Michael Hiltzik	$13.25	$9.99	$12.59
Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me	Richard Farina	$10.88
Behind-the-Scenes Baseball	Doug Decatur	$11.66
Managing Humans	Michael Lopp	$16.49
The Blighted Cliffs	Edwin Thomas	$17.99
Sails on the Horizon	Jay Worrell	$11.16	$9.99	$12.56
Revolution in the Head	Ian MacDonald	$11.53
Beautiful Code	Greg Wilson	$38.56	$28.79
The Making of Victorian Values	Ben Wilson	$17.81	$9.99	$19.56
Terwilliger Bunts One	Wayne Terwilliger	$16.95
Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage		$11.53
The Rider	Tim Krabbe	$9.35	$9.35	$11.65
The Yellow Jersey	Ralph Hurne	$11.66
Not a Suicide Pact	Richard Posner	$25.60	$14.27
The Places in Between	Rory Stewart	$10.76	$8.80	$9.45
Thinking for a Living	Thomas Davenport	$11.98	$9.58
Management by Baseball	Jeff Angus	$22.95	$9.99	$12.59
Rothstein	David Pietrusza	$10.88
Bicycling Science	David Gordon Wilson	$17.79

The table from Open Office Calc--which generates HTML that's as ugly as Excel's. I ran it through Tidy to clean things up a bit.

a dabbler's journal » Sony Reader

Selling e-Books

Wish List