Personville Press (which publishes ebooks by Jack Matthews) now has an online store through payhip for fans of Jack Matthews to buy ebooks and audio at low prices. In the past, the audio play was distributed to the major retail sites (Amazon, Apple, etc) through cdbaby. Unfortunately, cdbaby didn’t allow content publishers to discount very much, and so prices were crazy high. In contrast, payhip gives artists full control over pricing with minimal fees. Personville Press can earn a lot more money if you buy through payhip, so that allows prices to be discounted even deeper. Personville Press gives it two thumbs up!
Currently the audio play Interview with the Sphinx can be bought there for $2. If you are comfortable buying and managing digital content, you generally can buy Jack Matthews bundles at substantial discount from the payhip bookstore. Over the next week or so, all of Personville’s ebook titles will go on payhip and links will appear on the book pages for each title.
There are pros and cons of buying bundles of files than buying through established content sites like Amazon and Apple. Pros: 1. no digital rights management encryption, 2. the ability to share content with friends and family, 3. much cheaper prices, 4. access to the .epub file (which is more standards compliant than Kindle’s format). Cons: 1. no access to Amazon’s customer service (which is generally good). 2. Doesn’t automatically become part of the ebook cloud; you have to upload it manually (to Kindle, GPB or Apple). 3. Lack of customer reviews.
Let me address the last two cons. Obviously, you can always check Amazon or Goodreads for reviews. Also each ebook reading system (such as Amazon Kindle) provides instructions for uploading personal ebooks to their cloud. I upload ebooks all the time to my Kindle account and can access them anywhere.
