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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

I have no experience making millions of dollars from eBooks, but I can report that the final section is incorrect. I have sold books on leanpub.com to technically savvy users who apparently do pay for ebooks.

Twice I have tried to give away ebooks here on HN, and both times there were people who chose to pay even though the content was available free in PDF, iBook, and Kindle formats.

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I would argue that that represents an unusual case: people here pay you out of respect/gratitude for your contribution to the community.

For unknown authors, the sales picture is different.

That may be true. Let's say that it is. In that case, the article could be improved by distinguishing between the two cases of an author with a niche brand of some sort and an author without. If you have a niche brand, some of the other marketplaces may offer advantages such as lower costs or more flexibility.

An author with an established brand or significant following (and I count your HN reputation as an example) can sell anywhere, b/c readers will seek out his work and deal with all kinds of annoyances: usb cable device syncs, finding out which folder to copy into, which ebook format file to use, etc.

If you don't have a brand or following, though, selling through marketplaces that are not tied to devices is a huge disadvantage.

The typical ipad/kindle/nook user does not go outside the store built-in to the device looking for content (the majority of them probably don't even know it's possible), except for a small, bleeding-edge minority.

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