The Agency Model is a racket that takes away a seller's ability to price ebooks how they see fit.

This is bad for the consumer since it means that market forces have less sway and there is little to distinguish one store from another. You will not find ebooks on sale and there is no point in "shopping around" since the price is the same everywhere.

If similar agreements were in place for other products, it would cause lawsuits. Imagine if all of the oil products sold by Shell or BP were given fixed prices. Media companies would love to have their own profit-guaranteed cartel and will push for illegal agreements to defend their aging business model.

I never said that DRM and the agency model were related. I was merely pointing out that Apple's entry into the ebook market removed seller freedom and empowered publishers. This was in contrast to the parent post which stated that Steve Jobs brought freedom to music by removing DRM from music formats.

I personally think that Apple was afraid of losing too much of the ebook market to Amazon so they made a behind-the-scenes push for publishers to adopt the agency model to thwart Amazon's price advantage. This enabled them to enter the ebook market using their shiny iDevices and sell content at the same price as Amazon. Apple's policy change to require a 30% cut of in-app purchases further pushed their advantage and forced the Kindle app (as well as other ebook apps) to remove their "Store" button that launched Mobile Safari to the Kindle web store.

As to whether the agency model is better for consumers is arguable. It is good that there are more choices in the market. Having an Amazon monopoly on ebooks would be bad, but Apple's tactics to bully their way into the ebook market are pretty ruthless. Such ruthlessness can only be attributable to Steve Jobs' desire to have Apple control all consumer content on iDevices. iBooks is still somewhat of an afterthought compared to iTunes' offerings in terms of music and video. For example, why can't I read iBooks on my MacBook Air? Why can't I access my iBooks by a web browser (ala Kindle Cloud Reader).

I'm not an Apple hater. I own a MacBook Air and an iPhone. I think iDevices are very nice, but I don't think that the agency model is good for the consumer. It drives prices up and reduces the ability for ebook vendors to compete in the market.

Hmm. It seems that O'Reilly has two types of ebooks:

1) Ebooks obtained through their Safari Books Online website (using download tokens) are marked with email address and account name as I described in my above post.

2) Ebooks purchased through their website, shop.oreilly.com, are not marked this way.

Yes, I too think that DRM-free ebooks are a good thing.

If you read technical books, O'Reilly offers DRM-free ebooks from their website in several formats, including PDF, ePUB, and MOBI (Kindle-compatible).

They do this by marking your ebook: "Prepared for [your_email_address], [Your Name]" on the bottom of the pages. I think this is okay since it discourages piracy and marks the book as yours the same as if your wrote your name in the front cover of a paper book.

I hope that other publishers will adopt this practice or something similar.

You can thank Steve Jobs for the fully locked-down and now ubiquitous agency model that practically all publishers use.

"In the agency model, publishers set the price and designate an agent--in this case the bookseller--who will sell the book and receive the 30% commission. Adopting the model for e-books tends to mean e-book prices will rise, something both publishers and independent retailers applaud. Publishers believe low e-book prices devalue their books and cannibalize hardcover sales. Under the agency model once a price has been set it cannot be changed or discounted by the retailer and independent e-book retailers believe the higher prices of the agency model allow them to compete with big e-book vendors. " (from this article)

At least Amazon was selling ebooks for reasonable prices and encouraging competition in the market. Now we have a racket that is enforced on all sellers. Neither he nor Amazon have been able to dissuade publishers from using DRM.

Maybe not in print, but it has been conceptualized in video games

Ada 2005's task model is a real world, production quality approach to include concurrency in a hard-compiled language. Ada isn't exactly known for its GUI libraries (there is GtkAda), but it could be used as a foundation for an improved concurrent GUI paradigm.

This book covers the subject quite well.

Kindle books are almost always cheaper than the new print equivalent (used print books are cheaper).

There are many good books available on Kindle offered for free on a promotional basis. Usually these books are the first in a series. I grabbed a copy of Manifold: Time for free during a promotion and ended up buying the other two books in the series, Manifold: Space and Manifold: Origin for $6.99 each.

There are also sample chapters available for most books so you can read the book before deciding to purchase or not.

s/Test/Text/

They are in the ebook publishing business with the Amazon Digital Test Platform: https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin

You can have your book published directly to Kindle and get better royalties than many other publishers would give you.