No wonder the publishing industry is so hurting.

Most books are not even available as ebooks, and even when they are it is likely only in the United States of America, or at least that is the case for any book not on the New York Times Best Sellers List, which the majority of are fiction.

Here is a table of all the books I’ve bought from Amazon in the last 1.5 years for my Kindles:

Summary:

• I’ve bought 15 books.
• None of them are available in Canada at Amazon.ca!
• It cost me more to buy these books as ebooks than it costs in the USA for dead tree version of the books!
• Canadians pay more for dead tree books.

If I didn’t have a US address, then I would have bought zero books! Seth Godin’s Poke the Box isn’t even available on Kindle in Canada and it’s published by Amazon’s The Domino Project!

If you have information on the cost or availability of these books in other only stores or other countries, I’d love if you would share that data with me.

I find it incredibly frustrating how many books I go to purchase where an ebook either doesn’t exist or costs more than what a dead tree version costs. It makes no sense!

Rick Smith's The Leap costs 3 times more for the digital version

If I included all the books that I have not purchased the picture is even a lot grimmer. I end up borrowing from the local library the non-fiction or older books that I’m interested in — unfortunately many of them lately — rather than feel like a fool.

The UK is the only country where Consolations of Philosophy is only available on Kindle

Something has got to change. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the devices are (kindle3, ipad2) if you can’t get what you want to read.

I will close saying that one publisher is doing it well. If the Pragmatic Bookshelf has a book on a software topic I’m interested in, I will purchase it from them even if other tech publishers have a better rated book on the topic. The Pragmatic Bookshelf is the only ebook store that I know of that works.

And TypePad simply blows WordPress.com away on SEO when it comes to search engine indexing. TypePad delivers your blog posts directly to Google Reader and My Yahoo and Blogline.

Are there specific issues that WordPress needs to fix to reverse the blow (hard)?

Anil, do you have any data to support the wild claim that TypePad has better SEO than WordPress.com? Of course you don’t. Further, I don’t understand what the 2nd sentence means (link with additional info?) or how it even relates to SEO.

WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (once you enable permalinks) share the same great SEO, and WordPress is generally recognized as having the best SEO of any web publishing platform out there. We are very fortunate for having numerous SEO experts that have long participated in WordPress development including SEO luminaries like Google’s Matt Cutts.

Here are a couple of the most obvious issues TypePad could fix to get on the path to WordPress levels of SEO:

1. For years TypePad’s URLs of posts (permalinks) had underscores between_words, which still are not well supported by search engines. In the last couple of years thankfully they now default to using-hyphens for new posts which allows search engines to recognize the individual words.

Unfortunately, TypePad still only includes fifteen characters from the title in the URL. Anil’s example http://www.celebrity-babies.com/2008/06/scott-and-renee.html didn’t show this, but it often results in words being cut off in the mid.

Lets look at the articles of one of my favorite bloggers who I know to be on TypePad, Seth Godin. What would you or a search engine think is going to be the title of the post with the URL of http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/the-marketing-o.html . No, it isn’t “The Marketing O’”, it’s “The Marketing of Fear”. If you look at his other articles must suffer from this same problem.

If you want TypePad URL SEO you have to limit your titles to a couple of words?!

2. TypePad sets an article’s URL when a draft is first made and doesn’t update it when the title is updated. This one is the far more annoying and potentially embarrassing if the original title was inappropriate.

Lets look at the posts of another one of my favorite bloggers who I know to be on TypePad, Steve Rubel. Just looking at his posts on the front page, I only have to look to the 2nd post from the top to see an example of this problem. The title is “Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing”, but the URL is http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/06/how-friendfeed.html. How? That must have been how the beginning of his original draft read.

Where I see this issue the most is blogs with editors. Look for it the next time you are reading a Wired blog. I’m sorry now that I’ve pointed it out, you likely won’t be able to help but notice, and it will start to bug you too as much as it bothers me

Six Apart is well aware of both issues, and knows the SEO implications. For the second issue, I emailed Anil about this over six months ago, because it bugs me that much.

On the other hand, not only does WordPress not have either of these problems, if you change the URL after publishing, the old URL will continue to work and forward to the new URL.

I’ve done a few exports from TypePad, one of the most recent being Health.com’s blog. One of the things I did was review the existing search engine optimization and I’ve been repeatedly surprised to find scrapper sites some times show up above the blog in search results. My guess is these two issues at least play a part in this happening.

These type of issues are in the most basic examples of SEO. Worse, it’s just a lousy experience — I like to think the first rule of SEO is that the optimization is also a good user experience, or at the very least doesn’t detract from the experience. Come on Six Apart fix these issues. It’s better for everyone.