1. There are still too many formats. We need cross-industry support for a single, open standard. No vendor lockins, no DRM. At the very least PDF.
2. Better pricing. If Amazon can sell MP3s for 80p, then I want similar pricing per MB for books. 12GBP for an ebook is, quite frankly, a bloody rip-off. If they can sell an entire album for a fiver, with the artist and music label still getting a cut, then that's what I am willing to pay for a book.
3. Better choice. At the moment, there is no driver for ditching paper for digital. The range of ebooks, although growing, isn't good enough to get regular readers to switch. I spend 100's of pounds a year on books. OK, some are collectors or first editions that are trophies, but most are just day to day reads for the Tube or an evening when there's nothing decent on TV. But if I can't get Robert Jordan's "The Gathering Storm" (just released), then am I going to wait, or buy the Hardback for 12GBP? We need publishers to commit to providing e-copies of books, just as movie studios have started to provide digital copies on DVD or from Lovefilm / Netflix.
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Still issues
1. There are still too many formats. We need cross-industry support for a single, open standard. No vendor lockins, no DRM. At the very least PDF.
2. Better pricing. If Amazon can sell MP3s for 80p, then I want similar pricing per MB for books. 12GBP for an ebook is, quite frankly, a bloody rip-off. If they can sell an entire album for a fiver, with the artist and music label still getting a cut, then that's what I am willing to pay for a book.
3. Better choice. At the moment, there is no driver for ditching paper for digital. The range of ebooks, although growing, isn't good enough to get regular readers to switch. I spend 100's of pounds a year on books. OK, some are collectors or first editions that are trophies, but most are just day to day reads for the Tube or an evening when there's nothing decent on TV. But if I can't get Robert Jordan's "The Gathering Storm" (just released), then am I going to wait, or buy the Hardback for 12GBP? We need publishers to commit to providing e-copies of books, just as movie studios have started to provide digital copies on DVD or from Lovefilm / Netflix.