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Comment by cbr | Hacker News Reader

If you think that selling ebooks is simple and Amazon doesn't bring anything to the market, then why aren't publishers just selling ebooks directly?

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(a) Many do. In fact, many old paperbacks had order forms in the back for other books directly from the publisher. Been doing it forever. On the other hand, you will pay full cover price, which for ebooks means full hard-/paper-back price. Because...

(b) The publisher's other retail markets (Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart, other distributors and bookstores) would crap out a literal brick, which they would then apply to the publisher, if the publisher started competing with them.

Doesn't Amazon make it relatively difficult to use alternative stores with its e-readers (particularly the non-Android ones)?

Sure, but here's the thing: Spotify is still the best parallel. Amazon's weakness is they don't own the content everyone wants; they have to license it and there is no mandatory licensing. The big 5 publishers could up and stop letting amazon sell ebooks, form their own ebook selling consortium, and switch the vast majority of customers over. Or hell, buy B&N for the same reason.

I'm pretty sure that kind of organized industry-wide boycott would run afoul of antitrust laws — and if it weren't organized and industry-wide, the publishers who defected would probably just be shooting themselves in the foot, because they would not be able to get everyone to buy a new e-reader that couldn't read any of their existing books.

Yet Spotify exists. Are you aware of who owns a big chunk of it?

You can also put non-amazon books -- in formats such as pdf -- on kindle. It's not as simple as buying through amazon, but it's very doable. Further, everyone who owns a smartphone or a tablet can just download a reader app.

No, it is trivially easy to put non-DRMed books onto a kindle.

One publisher who I find particularly reader-friendly is Baen. If I buy a book from them, it goes into my account there so I can download it at any time (and any number of times) in the future, in a wide variety of formats. Since I do my reading on a kindle, I click the send to kindle link and it pops up next time I turn on my kindle's wireless.

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