Eoin Purcell
Palgrave Connect
Bookbrunch (which is fast becoming my book news source of choice, the fee structure cannot be far away!) offers an interesting story on Palgrave Mamillan’s launch of an ebook platform:
Palgrave Macmillan is to launch its own ebook platform, Palgrave Connect, in January 2009. More than 4,000 ebooks will be available in collections organised by year of publication and by discipline, with 2009 and backlist collections available to purchase on a one-time fee, perpetual access basis
Macmillan seems to understand digital. It’s a brave statement and one I may yet regret, but I think they have learned an enormous amount about how digital can work and how valuable communities are from their protected (from the perils of the TRADE market I stress) efforts at Nature. It seems to me too that they are the furthest along the road to offering any real competition to Google and its access platform.
I’m interested to see how this floats come January and launch. I’ll keep you posted!
Eoin
Eoin Purcell's Blog 
It’s funny, because up until now I had been thinking a lot about the price of ebooks (general trade rather than scholarly publishing I hasten to add!), and how they will have to come down considerably, and then I read *this* at Danuta kean’s excellent blog and I’m all confused and undecided again!:
“If e-books were price sensitive then e-book bestseller lists would be full of $3 e-books, but the e-books that sell the most are the same price as the physical edition, because they are the ones that people want to read.”
http://www.danutakean.com/blog/?p=316#more-316