The de facto place to buy
Kindle books is, of course, Amazon. Given how tightly this allows Bezos & Co. to manage things we're guessing this is how the company would like to keep it, but there may be direct-to-kindle competition brewing from an unlikely source: Scribd. The site, which started off as a place to dump and share random documents, has been following the YouTube path and is now selling access to fully copyrighted works. Many of those are downloadable as text, Word, or PDF documents, meaning Kindle users can already conjure up some conversion magic and get them on their devices. But, according to Scribd CEO Trip Adler, straight to Kindle distribution is next. The question is: will they be for-pay titles, or only the billions of pages of free content the site offers? Places like Feedbooks and Gutenberg.org let you download free content direct to the Kindle already, but we're not aware of anyone selling that content yet -- other than Amazon, of course.
posted December 21st 2009 7:56AM
Selling stuff does not automatically mean that it has to have DRM. The big names in the publishing industry may demand it, but there are many many other authors around who are more pragmatic. And will be happy that theri books are out there, even if there are a lot of pirate copies, so long as there are some people buying. Realistically speaking, there is not much difference between a cracked DRM infected book, and a DRM free book.
There are already places that sell e-books in mobi/ePub/PDF or whatever that don't use DRM. And as the Kindle even has DRM free formats, no reason why they can't extend the deal.
I'd happily pay for this one:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/10163222/Chronicles-of-Bruiser-Tales-of-a-Street-Sweeper
(Semi Relevent, but worth the read).