This was an unexpected and very welcome find. Webscriptions, associated with the Speculative Fiction publisher Baen Books offers eBooks the way it should be done. Reasonable prices, a wide variety of formats for different platforms, and DRM free! Other nice touches are that your purchase history is maintained on the site and you can redownload already purchased books in any format so if you change devices or technologies, you have a way to maintain your collection.
Webscriptions is integrated with the Bookshelf iPhone application which permits direct downloads, but this is not a requirement as you can download books in any format such as .lit and open the file in Stanza and transfer it across a Wifi network to Stanza running on an iPhone.
My only complaint for the moment is that the selection is relatively limited and even though many authors are present in the catalog, it’s often just a very limited subset of their complete works. Now if only there was a simple way to make authors aware of this service and let them know that this is the kind of service that many people prefer…
We’ve already seen this played out on the iTunes Music Store - I just hoping that book publishers come to the realization that DRM isn’t helping their situation faster than the music industry.