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Yes, it's essentially Amazon. But what can we (or anyone) do about it?

Not sure what the situation is today but, early on, we had to give up 70% of the list price if we wanted Amazon to sell our digital books. It's just mind-boggling.

And that's on top of the suboptimal user experience, because you can't sell a PDF via Amazon, and the Kindle toolchain is just awful. We have our publishing pipeline automated (DocBook to print-PDF, on-screen PDF, and EPUB); for a while we had bad Kindle/Mobi as well, but I don't think even that is possible today.

So, it's not only that Amazon gets a huge chunk of the money, you also have to accept the inferior quality of that particular distribution channel.




I'm still carrying a glimmer of hope that the FTC will step up, follow through, and put an end to some of amazon's more abusive practices.




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