(2012-06-15) Common Carrier Ebookstore

I used to think of Amazon as selling every book, like a Common Carrier. But some publishers have started pulling their titles, in 1 format or another. And obviously a number of Kindle EBook-s are exclusively there, so no other store carries them.

And I've been saying for a long time, inspired by Mike Shatzkin, that Book Publishing folks should be doing direct selling themselves (of at least EBook-s, if not Printed Book-s) to open a Permission Marketing channel with their readers. (And that authors should be trying to do that, also.)

So I guess the idea of a universal Book Store goes away, eh?

But Book Reviews And Groups services like Good Reads could do that, couldn't they? They could list Kindle-only titles and link to them, etc. (Google Books could do that, too.)

And with EBook purchasing, there's less of an issue of bundling multi-line orders, since there's no shipping charge. So it's not even a big issue to end up in 3 different e-bookstores in the same hour to buy 3 different books. As long as purchasing fulfillment is easy. Which it should be if small Ebook Store-s use "standard" payment handlers like PayPal and Google Wallet (and AmazonPayments).

See Book Publishing page for other related recommendations.

Jun25 update: Joe Wikert thinks all publishers should get together to form 1 e-Book Store. His main reasoning is to aggregate user buying behavior (since only minority do ratings/reviews) across publishers.

• a commenter, Carmen Buxton, notes that Good Reads actually sells ebooks on behalf of Self Publishing authors! They offer authors a tool to upload their entire book (in epub or PDF) and sell it right through Goodreads. Their limitations are rather daunting in that you have to grant a "perpetual license".