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Barry: This is a critical point. Thereâ(TM)s a huge data set proving that digital books are a price-sensitive market, and that maximum revenues are achieved at a price point between $.99 and $4.99. So the question is: why arenâ(TM)t publishers pricing digital books to maximize digital profits?

Joe: Because they're protecting their paper sales.

Barry: Exactly.

Joe: It's awfully dangerous for an industry to ignore (or even blatantly antagonize) their customers in order to protect self-interest.

This is one thing that puts me off buying ebooks. At the moment they are overpriced.

Another problem is that they come with DRM, and running a free operating system I cannot read them and have to resort to other methods to obtain a free copy. I would much rather purchase a reasonably priced ebook with no DRM so that some money goes to the author.

We are left with the same untenable situation with ebooks as there was with the music industry, that is that you get a better ebook for free which is flexible and can be read on any ereader than you get by purchasing for £12 from an official ebook retailer.

I'm burning mod points to post this, but this needed to be addressed. What you're saying is true for the large publishing houses, but a little bit of googling will find PLENTY of material to read for reasonable prices. One example turned up in Stanza's FAQ. For those who are not familiar with Stanza, it is a free ebook reader for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch platforms. I've had it for a while and am very happy with it.

I've bought a lot of Kindle books from Amazon. The most common format they sell is simply the old Mobipocket format with DRM added. The scripts to strip the DRM are out there (K4MobiDeDRM.pyw), and you can use Calibre to convert to any of a wide variety of other formats should you not like Mobipocket (or should your reader not support it). If you go this route, ActiveState Python 2.x is the preferred distribution to run the scripts. I use this method and convert all my books to have both Mobi and ePub because Stanza on my iPad, which does not support Mobipocket, has some features that the iOS Kindle app lacks (like in-app screen brightness adjust).

There are some mostly image-intensive books that use a different format called Topaz, but that too has been broken, although the conversions often look more like a typical pirated scan/OCR than a good quality ebook. Fortunately, the format is relatively rare, and of course if you are willing to spend some time cleaning it up you can have a nice clean book - there is no chance that you'll lose the text, just that it won't look right.

Unless they changed this with iphone os 4 (the three letter IOS will always apply to Cisco devices in my mind regardless of capitalization) there is no file system access on the iphone. If VLC can't access the library due to Apple restrictions you would have to get music/videos on the phone through VLC itself (since the sandboxing prevents it from accessing other apps data).

Wrong. Here's how I got books into Stanza on my iPad (which I prefer to iBooks for reading my pdfs). Sure it's sub-optimal, but if I can play my mkv and other non-apple content, I'll be happy as a clam.

You missed the fact that many people already have an ebook reader and don't even know it. Do you have an iPhone or iPod Touch? Then you have access to multiple e-readers, from commercial one-store-only readers like Amazon's Kindle, B&N's eReader (reskinned and restricted version of Fictionwise's eReader), or Kobo to open readers like Stanza (the best reader on iDevices by far, though for best iPad support you need to jailbreak and install FullForce). Don't have an iDevice? That's okay. There are e-readers for Android, Windows Mobile, and even Blackberry. If you have a PDA or smartphone, in all likelihood you already have an e-reader.

I also don't think your price discussion is right. Go visit forums like MobileRead and you'll see that many of the posters are actually very price conscious. The current ebook market is in its infancy at the moment and still hasn't come to the realization that DRM-free product will still sell. Until then, the limitations imposed (can't "lend" an ebook like you can a paper book, for example) are pretty obvious to end users and most people are unwilling to pay anywhere close to the price of a paper book for a restricted ebook. (that most ebook DRM has been cracked does not change that fact -- to get the industry to change you have to vote with your wallet, and if you buy DRMed ebooks only to rip off the DRM yourself later the sellers don't see the second half. They just see that they offered DRMed books and you bought them, so obviously people will buy DRMed books).

I first started reading ebooks on a Windows CE device back in 2000, and continued reading on my iPhone since 2007. I got my first eInk reader just this past Friday, and that was only $110 (yay for Woot!). Most of my reading has been free or classic books, with the occasional purchase from Kindle's store. At this point I've pretty much stopped buying paper books.

To my surprise, one of the most important functions I wanted in a book reader was not there -- I could not import my own documents.

You can't? That's news to me. Just last week I downloaded a text file ("Leiningen Versus The Ants"), used Calibre (GPL) to convert it to epub, launched Calibre's built-in webserver, opened Stanza on my iPod, pressed the "Get Books" button, looked under "Computers Sharing Books", and downloaded the file.

To my surprise, one of the most important functions I wanted in a book reader was not there -- I could not import my own documents.

You can't? That's news to me. Just last week I downloaded a text file ("Leiningen Versus The Ants"), used Calibre (GPL) to convert it to epub, launched Calibre's built-in webserver, opened Stanza on my iPod, pressed the "Get Books" button, looked under "Computers Sharing Books", and downloaded the file.

http://www.lexcycle.com/

Try Stanza, it's even free. There's also Kindle.app from Amazon, iSilo, eReader and several others.

There's a vastly better way of going about this.

Sell your e-book through one of the commercial services that the iPhone's most popular ebook reader Stanza supports. Your book will be available to over a million iPhone / Touch users (not to mention the other outlets the particular book store may have), and since Stanza purchases are downloaded to the device, they can be read anywhere.

Further, the app store is not a place to sell a book. I don't want an icon for a single book on my app launcher any more than I want an icon for an album on there. I want to go into Stanza to read, just like I want to go into iPod mode to listen.

It's a [...] Ebook. Why the hell do you need javascript?

It because there are no other ebook readers for iPhone, especially ones with stores that could sell his book.

Seriously, please don't write any more single-use ebook readers! I guarantee they won't be as good as Stanza or the Kindle App, and I don't want to have my library spread across 100 little wonky apps. This is a solved problem. Quit reinventing the solution. Please?