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Aloha, On 11/4/2011 10:22 PM, D G Mattichak jr wrote: The general tone among publishers is that while the big traditional publishing houses are worried printed books are not going to go away. It will only be the people that publish them who will change. Recently Russell Grandinetti, one of AmazonâEUR^(TM)s top executives, who said; âEURoeThe only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader. Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.âEUR? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rewrites-the-rules-of-book-publishing.html Grandinetti is accurate only to the extent that each writer exclusively distributes ebooks herself or himself. But in the preponderance of instances, a third party--the ebook distributor--will play a crucial-- and profitable--part. (I don't think list members fail to note that Amazon is, right now, the largest ebook distributor.) One of the big struggles going on around the growing ebook market has to do with who gets what chunk of the sales money. The ebook pricing model--the agency model--appears to ensure that the various chunks are large enough that some parties (e.g., authors) don't get skunked. Ebook distributors like Amazon were, at one time, eager to set all ebook prices low because they could make money from high aggregate ebook sales volume. (And, I suspect, gain control of most of the distribution.) This struggle continues. But I think that the agency pricing model will stick. Another big struggle has to do with digital rights and their management. The key issue here (for me, at least) involves which parties--authors, publishers, agencies, distributors, readers, etc.--hold which digital rights. Printed books belong to the reader/buyer. Ebooks, so far as I can figure out, do not. The ebook a reader sees with a reader device is more or less a leased and limited right to a formatted file. You may, for instance, gather up a bundle of printed books and loan them to a friend. Or sell them. Or donate them to a library. Ebooks may be shared only one at a time. And they cannot be resold. I am not sure whether they can be donated from a personal account to a library, but I think not. Because library ebooks have a different collection of associated rights. (To be clear, I am talking about ebooks under some copyright, at least as far as digital rights are concerned. But I suspect that technical considerations might hinder sharing bundles of "free" ebooks.) Access to most ebooks, after all, is through an ebook distributor. They, their computers and networks, act as gatekeepers between an ebook reader and the ebooks in their library. Fees are involved, as are ways to tally and charge them. (Here in the USA, this amounts to registering an account with a credit card. No credit card, no registered account, no access. An ereader without a registered account is, pretty much, a paperweight.) Let me add here that access to academic ebooks might require paying high fees. That custom could continue. This brings me to the matter of archiving. One thing that this thread has made very clear to me is that convenience of access does not mean security and stability of archives. Not within the electronic domain. Not in the world. The electronic cloud is fugitive. Libraries of ebooks could disappear for many reasons. I think that we still need to rely on low-tech and enduring ways to archive information. Like printed books. And physical libraries. Or some sort of pile of clay and stone tablets. Musing Ebooks Have Their Advantages & Their Disadvantages! Rose, Pitch