Why Is Selling ebooks So Damn Complicated?

As a person of the web, I just cannot for the life of me understand why selling ebooks has to be so complicated, and so expensive. Whenever I’ve spoken to publishers, I hear all the explanations, about list prices, and retail margins, and distributor fees, and DRM costs, and I nod my head, and say, “OK, but what if you were to …” And the answer always seems to be: “Impossible!”

The old Publisher-Distributor-Retailer model (with each taking a big slice of the pie) seems to prevail still into the digital age, for reasons that seem to make some sense when someone passionate is explaining them to you insistently. And then you walk away and say: What? That doesn’t make any sense at all! It’s the Internet! It doesn’t have to be like that at all.

And my question, more or less, is why can’t an ebook store look like the store David Nygren outlines in this post? With, for instance:

* Online database of all ebook titles, à la Amazon, including tools for discovering content.

* eBooks only. Only digital inventory and distribution.

* Readers can conveniently purchase books from all participating publishers via the central database.

* Publishers set their own price.

* The Google-ish entity gets a small percentage of the value of each purchased ebook (i.e. something far, far less than Amazon’s 60%) and also displays relevant ads. Ad sales allow the seller’s royalty to remain low.

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