Minor Thoughts from me to you

On Tuesday, I was happy to discover that I can buy most of the Horatio Hornblower novels for Kindle. Because I'm stubborn, I've spent the past three days trying to find out why Beat to Quarters and Ship of the Line aren't available on Kindle. I've figured it out.

All of the current Kindle editions are published by eNet Press. I'd never heard of them before seeing that Amazon listed them as the publisher. Their site tells me that they "specialize in publishing ebooks from the works of classic best selling authors of the 20th century".

I searched their site and they have a listing for Beat to Quarters.

Due to Copyright issues, this book is not available as a separate volume. However it is available in our three volume omnibus Captain Horatio Hornblower.

The omnibus includes Beat to Quarters, Ship of the Line, and Flying Colours. I can buy the omnibus directly from eNet Press, but I'd prefer to buy it from Amazon. It's not listed on Amazon's site. I asked eNet Press about that. They told me that it's their policy to only sell some of their books on Amazon. The omnibuses are deliberately being held back as direct sale exclusives.

I'm happy to learn that I can buy books 1–5 and 9–11 as single volumes and that I can buy 6–8, even if only as an omnibus.

I like the convenience of having all of my books directly in my Kindle library, so I'm disappointed that I can't buy Captain Horatio Hornblower through Amazon. I'll buy it directly from eNet Press, when I'm ready to read it. If they ever do decide to sell it on Amazon, I may buy it again, for the convenience of having everything in one place.

I had some feedback for eNet Press. I'm skeptical about their strategy of having direct sale exclusives. Over the past couple of years, I've done multiple Google searches for variations of "hornblower kindle edition" or "hornblower ebook" and their collection of Hornblower books has never once come up in my search results.

I didn't find them until after I first found their books on Amazon. Then I realized that I should check who published the books, to see if I could get more information directly from them. I think it's quite possible that they're losing sales by keeping things hidden away on their own site. It may be that they're making more per copy by selling it directly (since they don't have to pay fees to Amazon), but they may be losing money overall by selling fewer copies.