I might pay half as much for a book that’s in paper format as well, to get it on my iPhone. And I’ll wait till that’s half of paperback price, thanks. Without the cost of paper in the mix, not to mention no fear of returns? I don’t see why I should pay paper prices for an iPhone book. I’ll go to Project Gutenberg instead. *cuddles Stanza*

They want it to go away. They want us to be back in that happy reality where books only exist on paper and are therefore much much harder to pirate.

So they offer us ebooks at the same price or higher than the print version. As if we’re going to think suddenly that the print version is a “deal” and buy it.

I read almost exclusively in print. It would be exclusively if I didn’t have some friends published in E-only. But people who want e-books want ebooks, and they aren’t going to buy the paper copy cause of pricing musical chairs.

They’ll just buy ebooks from someone else.

If the big publishers are going to be stupid about this, then the smaller publishers can and will take advantage of that to increase their own sales opportunities.

Are we talking about the same Fictionwise? Because I order from them all the time, and while I could opt to use Paypal to order, that’s such an accepted payment-method now that it’s nearly seamless to the user. Or I can use a c’card, and again the interface is seamless even if there’s embedding going on via the c’card application. From a user point of view, there’s no grounds to this argument about Fictionwise, because the interface is about as seamless as any other, including Amazon.

Plus, Fictionwise allows me to search based on the format I want, and being a non-Kindle, non-Moby, non-Iceberg-whatever-it-is, oh, AND non-iPhone, non-Blackberry, non-Reader person, I have no need nor interest in those formats. I get multiformat (locked or unlocked) Adobe PDF and read it on my big honking iMac screen, no squinting or additional technology required, opened in Adobe — also a cross-platform thing.

Krozser asked, “Are you trying to kill the market? Are you trying to be funny?”

I wonder if part of this is because when publishers act as their own retailers, they lose the gatekeepers who can sometimes be voices of reason. I mean, back when I owned a bookstore, if there was a book priced unreasonably high, I often made comments: “no way am I ordering that, are you people crazy? pass it along, I think someone over there is on crack.” I could, quite simply, refuse to sell it, and distract most customers with an alternate book/topic that wasn’t priced ridiculously high.

When the application goes right up on the web and straight to customer eyes, there’s no savvy business-retail person in the middle anymore to tell the publishers, “you people are on CRACK.” And in my experience, publishers and distributors each know their own business really well: but their business is wholesale, not retail, and when they get into retail, they just reveal how little they really know about that half of the equation, and end up making it even harder on those who do.

“Yes, we currently sell all of our eBooks to Fictionwise and are happy to continue doing so. Again, we can agree to disagree about whether theirs is the best approach to commerce.”

For the record, I certainly don’t think it’s the ideal solution. In MY perfect world, I’d be able to buy books right out of the iTunes store, the same way I buy music, etc., and they’d be transferred into my preferred reading app, but the prices would have to be at least as good as Fictionwise’s. But if the only way to put the books on my Apple account is to buy them as standalones from the app store (no matter the price), I’m out. That’s just a big cumbersome mess, and if it’s what we wind up with, I fear for the health of that market.

And my last comment may have come across as snottier than I intended it. If it read snotty to you, I apologize.