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Brandon Sanderson / Re: Mistborn Book 1 ebook
« on: February 04, 2010, 05:07:24 PM »[sic] I can see not wanting to include some of the unpopular stories that even the best authors sometimes churn out. But in my opinion they should certainly keep single storylines complete. You'd think that the economics of ebooks would get rid of stupidity like not having MB1 in stock.
Well, its not like a brick and mortar store where shelf space is limited.. Really, the only cost would be storage and bandwidth. Inventory isn't really an issue.
Given that, I'm not sure what kind of licensing an ebookstore has with a publisher to offer their books. Do they have to pay to have access to certain titles? I wouldn't think so, but I admit I'm ignorant on this topic, so could be completely wrong...
Those books may not even be available from the publisher (although, apparently the Mistborn series is available, but for some reason the Sony store doesn't offer it).
Unlike the digital music industry, which has had many years now to mature some, the eBook business is somewhat new and still growing. You have different DRM methods for different stores, usually locking you into their devices. Even among epub providers, they sometimes don't work (B&N, for example, doesn't appear to work with the Sony Reader). Hopefully, in the future, we'll see if there's some kind of standardization on format and DRM methods...
So much simpler when I preferred paperbacks.