To commenter Steve Davidson #3:

Jane,

very nice – and in most repsects I completely agree with you. But I’d like to hear your take on one specific, seemingly outlandish scenario.

Please accept the scenario as the working environment, rather than worrying about its seeming ridiculousness.

Suppose that in advance of publication, you know two things about the market it is targeted for: 1. a closely related market is not only hostile to the book, but to the author as well. 2. that same community has amply demonstrated in the past that they are both capable of and motivated to use whatever means possible (including pirating) to damage sales, sell pirated versions, etc., etc.

Would you still advocate an e-book version? Staying away from DRM? Simultaneous release (print & e)?

This is a real scenario and if you feel that you haven’t gotten enough info to make a considered judgment, I’ll be happy to supply more off-blog.

Thanks.

Dish!

Are you serious?

As a consumer and producer of ebooks, let me tell you, this is simple crackpot evangelism. EPUB is the future; I do not disagree and I would love to see it come into its own and beat the competition.

HOWEVER

The competition exists for a reason and that’s because there are competing machines out there. Why in the world wouldn’t a producer find and exploit every digital outlet he could while they exist?

Now, I understand it’s perfectly reasonable for a producer of analog music to give up making vinyl records and 8-track tapes when there are few enough record players and 8-track players that it makes no sense to spend the time to do so. But if there is fairly equal money in each format, it would be foolish for the producer to give up producing even one of those formats.

In short, there is no way we would give up any one of the (now) 10 digital formats we publish in unless and until all devices can and will read one format and that the majority of the users of those devices are choosing one format:

AZW (Kindle)
EPUB (any device using Stanza or Adobe Digital Editions)
HTML (a lot of devices, plus any browser)
IMP (eBookwise)
LIT (Microsoft Reader)
LRF (Sony PRS)
MOBI/PRC (any device using Mobipocket)
PDB (Palm)
PDF (any device that reads PDF), and coming soon,
iApp for the iTunes store (iPhone/iTouch)

The fact of the matter is that once you’ve formatted for one of the above, you’ve formatted for over half the rest with minor tweaks. Yeah, it takes time to make each pretty for its own device, but it’s worth it as long as people feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth.

And every single one of those formats has a serious issue or 3 that consumers don’t like. However, each consumer still has the choice of the format with the least number of annoyances for him. Giving me 1 format (or, in the case of a book I really really really wanted to buy) 4 formats that are pure hell on me isn’t going to get me to adopt those formats; it’s only going to jolt me out of my impulse buy and now that I’m not BUYING paper books anymore, I’ll get it at the library.

So, Hachette Book Group. Thanks for saving me some money, ’cause I wasn’t strong enough to withstand the temptation if it had been in a format I could use.

Got an email from Ms. Malle Vallik today on the subject of my ebook shopping woes. She will be addressing my concerns for the Harlequin digital team and wanted me to know that.

And you know what? With that one little email, all my lingering irritation vanished.

Harlequin is not hurt by the fact that I am now also in love with Kristan Higgins.

My credit card is trembling at this very moment. With anticipation or fear, I don’t know, but it’s going to get abused.

And you know what else? With that one little email, Harlequin got a customer for life, delivery issues be damned.

(Although the fact that she needed to defies winning models of doing businesses, but this is publishing we’re talking about.)

This one in particular caught our attention over at B10 Mediaworx (which website is in the middle of redesign to implement a better shopping cart than what we’ve got now):

Have a website where readers can easily find out about titles, where to get them, what formats they’ll be in, when they’re being released, and how they relate to other books with a link to an excerpt. Each publisher’s website should contain the information of title, release date and book description as early as possible along with the excerpt.

I can’t tell you how many times I have:

A. Gone to a website to purchase an ebook and had to spend upwards of a half an hour to do so because of all the extraneous steps required (or got tired or distracted or had a time limit and ended up not buying at all) and/or

B. Couldn’t find anything anywhere to tell me where I could purchase an ebook, even though I knew it was available (this included trolling authors’ sites, which helped little nor not at all) and/or

C. Read someone (or a whole lot of someones) on some blog complaining about A and/or B.

Quite often I read someone who goes, “Hey, Author A: Tell your publisher it needs to do X, Y, Z because I’d sure LIKE to buy your book, but I can’t. What’s up with that?” It doesn’t help anyone to request an author to help because s/he has no control over that—

—which is kind of the nice thing about opening up your own shop. (And some days, you have to scramble to rustle up any nice thing about opening up your own shop.)