Friday 28 January 2011

So e-books won't take off hey...

While there seem to be plenty of people out there who don't believe in the e-book I really wasn't surprised when I turned on the news this morning and one of the lead stories was Amazon's announcement that in the USA in the last quarter of 2010 sales of kindle books outsold paperbacks. What did surprise me slightly was that the figures don't even take into account free books. A related story that also appeared today is that for the first time the judges of the Man Booker prize have been sent e-readers to read longlisted books on.

So to the cynical price fixers at Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster publishers, all of whom have adopted the "agency model" and invariably price kindle editions at a higher price than the paperback version, you may not like e-books but it's about time you embraced change, realised they are here to stay and stop ripping consumers off with a business model of such dubious legality!

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