> Is this really true? I usually by ebook/pbook combo and I find that I get a better deal directly on the publisher's website. Amazon is a non starter for me because I don't buy into their ebook format. "ebook" to me means epub and pdf.

OK, well, it's not true if you discount the biggest and cheapest competitor out of hand.

Kindle versions of most of the tech books would be $21-23 all the time (in the US), vs $39 for the DRM free format. You give up freedom for that $20 but also gain some convenience (frictionless buying process, library management). It is an interesting revealed preference when both are offered which sells at what price.

It would be a no brainer to check a box and get DRM-free vs DRM for the same price. I'd probably pay some premium once I get something (Calibre?) to manage other formats as well as I can manage kindle today, especially since stripping DRM from the latest Amazon format is more challenging than before. But as someone who reads 100+ books/year, it would be hard to justify paying 2x the price for the subset of books I only read once.

Good point! I guess I'm thinking in terms of dividing the market into 3 types of products: paper copy, locked-down DRM copy, DRM-free ebook. In 2/3 of those, Amazon and publishers don't compete. And on paper copies, publishers usually sell at list price with Amazon priced sometimes significantly less.

There's also a 4th type which is the used paper copy, where publishers kind of by definition don't compete.

Regardless, that's my admittedly naive rationale for why Amazon or other retailers shouldn't mind sharing review data with the publisher for use on its site.

I am involved with ebook production for an academic publisher. I sometimes joke that I am going to have "that doesn't work on the Kindle" engraved on my tombstone.

A post listing some of these things (things that doesn't work on the kindle, not tomb stones) would be very interesting

For instance, if a book has an embedded jpeg, you can tap it and enlarge it to fill the screen. But if it is SVG art (as we often use for line art like charts and maps), it will not scale. Why not? I don't know. There is no support for MathML, or for scripting of any kind. Support for embedded video is poor. Page lists are suppressed in favor of Amazon's own proprietary system. Note that epub readers like Calibre and Apple iBooks can manage these things. It is intrusive about formatting: it may decide that your lists need to be bulleted whether you want them or not. It always underlines links, which is a pain with note callouts. These behaviors may be inconsistent across devices.

Adobe Digital Editions supposedly supports most of the epub standard, but is a buggy mess, esp. the Windows version.

> These behaviors may be inconsistent across devices.

The image handling inconsistencies are very annoying. Here is what I've seen with several books.

1. When read on an eInk Kindle, images are small. (I can tap them to bring up the option to zoom, and zooming does work, but it is kind of ugly). For example, I've seen chess books where the diagrams are about twice postage stamp size, whereas in the physical book they are about 3 or 4 times as big in each dimension.

2. When read on the Kindle desktop application on Mac, the images are bigger. As far as I can tell when I've been able to compare to the physical book, they are the correct size.

3. When read on the Kindle desktop application for Windows, the images are small like they are on Kindle eInk readers.

4. When read in the Kindle cloud reader, they are the right size like on the Mac desktop application.

5. When read on iPhone with the iOS Kindle app, the images are small.

The main places I've noticed these are with chess books, where the position diagrams are the victims, and math books, where diagrams are the victims, and often also equations if the equations are done as images.

Image sizing is a tricky issue. When ebooks started to become a more mainstream thing, image size in the file was limited by the vendors, and also we sometimes had third-party licensing restrictions. Over time, of course, devices got more memory and higher-resolution screen, so larger file sizes are allowed, or even desirable. However, consistent behavior is still elusive. And that's even assuming optimal coding on the part of the publisher or whoever is doing their conversions; they may be using files that are not adequate for the higer-res screens.