What I don’t like is the agency pricing system. I don’t understand why I can get retailer discounts on print books but for some publishers I am completely blocked from using the same retailer coupons on ebooks.

As someone who recently purchased a Kindle, I have been looking for various work by various authors; books I may already own, but that I know I will read again and again (Zelazny’s Amber, Jack Chalker’s Well World, Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni, etc. I am shocked how few of these are fully available as eBooks! I can’t find any of the Amber books, I can’t find the “Watchers at the Well” series, and only the first three Deryni books and the most recent three seem to be available (leaving 3 trilogies unavailable). Stephen Donaldson’s first and second Thomas Covenant trilogies aren’t available either. My apologies if I’m mentioning items not most recently published by Del Rey/Spectra – however, except for Zelazny’s Amber (which I’m not certain about), I believe all of these were at least *originally* published here.

Which leads me to one other thought – any book published in the past 20-30 years should (I would think) be easy to make an eBook out of, because (I assume) by the early 1990’s at the very latest, the contents of the books should be in electronic form already. While I’m not a publisher, I’ve put together enough documents of my own to know that the best way to handle the contents are to disconnect them as much as possible from the physical formatting on the page; a last minute decision to make a slight change is unlikely to cause major issues then. And, whenever a book is to be published in more than one page size, the formatting effort becomes minimal. Now, I do imagine there are exceptions; cases where standard formatting rules would make a page look odd and can really only be overcome by having a human being make some adjustments (best example would be cases where a line would fall very short of normal length, and where simply hyphenating will either not help, or will result in an even odder appearance; one might need to shrink or grow the size of a space slightly to push that line into a more normal appearance, without making other aspects of the page look even odder). I also understand the desire to minimize the cannibalizing of sales of the physical book by pricing an eBook for notably less (though, through Amazon at least, I don’t really understanding why the eBook should be priced so that it regularly costs *more* that the (usually at least 25-30% off) physical book).

However, an eBook should logically cost less than the physical book – if nothing else, the cost of shipping the eBook to stores, the cost of the actual paper/cardboard used to print the book and the actual printing cost (the process of turning paper, cardboard and ink into the book we see on a bookshelf, as distinct from the layout/design costs) – these should all go away. (And yes, economies of scale being what they are, if eBooks were seriously cutting into the sales of physical books, then the costs that are tied directly to the number of books printed would tend to increase, and it would not be entirely unreasonable for eBooks to subsidize those costs so that the prices of physical books didn’t go up dramatically.)

And, as I noted above, there should be almost no cost in keeping an eBook “in print” (i.e., available for sale) once it’s been offered. Even moving to a new file format would tend to involve a one-time cost to set up a conversion process, rather than a significant on-going cost (and there are caveats here too). There’s no major concern about shelf wear on books that don’t sell quickly; no need to clear out older, slow-selling titles to make room for the latest releases; no warehouse storage/wastage to worry about.

As many publishers have clearly noted, eBooks make for previously unheard-of marketing opportunities as well. It would be very hard to find a reasonable method to give away the first book in a series, and even a publisher’s discount would be difficult to really pass on to the consumer (Barnes & Noble won’t be buying your discounted stock if they’ve already got hundreds of copies in a warehouse, and thus won’t be offering your discount). However, dropping the price of the omnibus of the first Shannara trilogy, and giving _The_Sword_of_Shannara_ away free for the month before and after the release of _The_Measure_of_The_Magic_ is easy in the eBook world.

I’d imagine that their skills at self-promotion and social media manipulation will also be important, besides their writing. At least from what I’ve seen online.