Ask HN: Why many publishers don't sell e-book editions?

2 points·shubhamjain··4 comments

I wanted to read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman but I found out that it doesn't have any Kindle edition. I am not going to inconvenience myself by buying a paperback, I would just use torrents instead.

Why is there reluctance to publish e-book editions? There are many people like me who have grown used to Kindle and rarely buy paperbacks.

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I see a Kindle Edition here

https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Bus...

One possible cause is the pricing: Kindle strongly encourages you to price books at most 9.99 and a publisher might want to price their eBook higher (so as not to undercut the print version).

Another reason is that it's not trivial to produce a good looking eBook, and some publishers might not have the technical know how.

Question for you: do you get all your books through Kindle store or do you also get PDFs and other .mobi downloaded from the net? Also, what's so bad about printed books?

I'm not the author but here's my answer: I get zero books from the Kindle store because of DRM. I want the book to be mine and be able to read it as I please forever. I considered buying DRMed books and remove the protection. I never did and this is getting difficult or impossible due to better crypto (but it can't defeat OCR). There are plenty of books to read with no DRM on them, or just buy paper.

To answer the OP, I can't be sure but creating an ebook takes time. Try doing it with Calibre, it's an interesting exercise. Easy for text novels, not so much for books with many pictures, formulas, tables, footnotes.

> I get zero books from the Kindle store because of DRM

This is an option up to the author.

https://i.imgur.com/J8oBLl2.png

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