Just as Seth Godin has dared to imagine a better Kindle and a better Amazon, I’d like to try imagining an altogether better ebook retailer.

Hey, Google (or somebody with money, programming skills and ad sales), create this…

• 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.

• Publishers get contact info of ebook buyers.

• 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.

• eBook buyers retrieve their ebooks from the Google-ish entity, where they are available and permanently stored in all viable formats, including .html for online reading.  I repeat:  a reader purchases the book once and will permanently have all existing and new ebook formats available for that title.

• Perhaps users of the eBook Warehouse can lend access to the book (or maybe even sell it) to other users.  While loaned, the title is no longer available on the owner’s virtual bookshelf, though it can remain on any device to which it has been downloaded.

• Since the majority of ebook readers will love the eBook Warehouse, the majority of ebook sales go through the Google-ish entity, allowing it to enjoy insane profits while keeping its own royalty percentage very low.

• Publishers, and by extension authors, will know who their readers are, giving them a better chance of drawing each reader into the publisher’s and/or author’s community.

• Authors will get a much larger cut of each book’s revenue than they do either with Amazon’s current ebook model or the standard print model.

• Readers will know that they will own their ebooks perpetually and that they will always be available to them online.  They will have the ability to loan them and to use them on any device.

Build it.

P.S. Increasing publishers’ standard ebook royalty rates can be dealt with separately.

Update: Of course, it would be best if several companies tried to do this.  Barnes & Noble, with its ready-made brand, would be a natural player (and how amusing would it be if the brick and mortar giant become the ebook sales giant?).  Also, publishers could band together to set maximum royalty percentages they will allow a seller to retain.  Any seller trying to increase its cut above this level would get no new ebook titles from the coalition of publishers.

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