Re: Our "publish then filter" future...

At 8:20 AM +1300 3/23/08, you wrote:
>I agree with your analysis, and I think it will come to pass. My
>thoughts are that we need a comprehensive site, like abebooks, that
>corralled all ebook media. It would minutely categorize them by genre,
>sub-genre and subject,


And allow authors, publishers and users to tag and re-categorize it as they think will help others.


>and include a 25 word synopsis, so that you could
>scan 20 or more books on each page.


I assume you mean just what appears in a list view. There would need to be much more than 25 words about the book available.



>Each would also have ratings, and
>ebay-type feedback (no long reviews!) along with cover art and a short
>excerpt, all accessible from the book's main page . The site could be
>ad-supported, both with CPC and banner ads from authors looking to
>support their work.


This is, of course, a large part of the problem. How would this site support itself?



>The idea would be to make it the first destination
>for anyone looking to buy an ebook, so that they could sift through the
>dreck to find the exact book they want and then be whisked away to to
>that book's actual site to complete the purchase. Later they would come
>back and add their rating to the books quotient, so that others would
>know if the purchase was a good one.
>
>It would need to be heavily promoted in order that interested people
>would know the name, just like ebay and amazon
>
>If such a site exists already, then I haven't found it. I would
>certainly use it. Anyone have a couple million dollars to start this
>up? Suzanne
>

While I'm not sure that all of the details are right, I do think that something like this needs to exist. Personally, I think it will be more along the lines of a distributor -- someone who provides the ebooks to retailers like Ingram provides pbooks to retailers like Amazon. But I'm not yet prepared to make an argument to support my belief.

In many ways your site sounds like an online retailers site -- an ebook equivalent of Amazon.com. But you seem to want the sales to go to each individual book's site. Why?

There are certainly economies of scale available to a large organization that sell's everyone's books. Credit card fees, for example, decline with volume. Where small companies that accept credit cards pay 2.5% and more, the larger companies pay 1.5% and less.

Everytime I think through how this might work, I end up with the traditional channel model that we have today, but in the online ebook world -- publishers sell and provide information to wholesalers, who, in turn, provide that information and sell to retailers, and each level gets a cut of the sale.

But I could be missing something.

How do you see this working?

Kent




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