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Mar. 22nd, 2010 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaI would love, love, love it if publishers would offer bundles of ebook and paper book. Like—I'm making up numbers, bear with me—if a paperback is $8 and the ebook version is $6, I'd pay $12 for both the paper copy and a download link. If a hardcover is $20 and the ebook is $10, I'd pay $26 for both. Like that.
I wonder why no big presses have done that. Perhaps they think they can get people to pay full price for both? But that doesn't seem like it'd happen very often.
I wonder why no big presses have done that. Perhaps they think they can get people to pay full price for both? But that doesn't seem like it'd happen very often.
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Date: 2010-03-23 06:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 06:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 07:05 am (UTC)Sorry that was so brief, earlier--I hit Post before I'd meant to, then decided the comment could stand as it was. :P
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Date: 2010-03-23 10:36 am (UTC)I've long said that if Terry Pratchett were available in e-book I'd buy the whole lot - because when you talk about books it's so much easier to search a file so you can find the references; and while I'm not, and won't be for a while, read e-books all the time (the 'in the bath' problem) I'd love to have the book on the go available both as paperback and electronically. Leave the house, continue to read the same book sounds great.
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Date: 2010-03-23 05:13 pm (UTC)And yeah, that's exactly it. I bring my Kindle with me on trips, and I tuck it into my bag in case I want something to read if I have an unexpected delay. But I like having a paper copy so that I can read it in the bath, lend it to friends, etc. Being able to switch between the two would make me a very happy camper.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 12:47 pm (UTC)Before easy electronic copying of media, buying the physical thing (a book, or a record) was the same as buying the license to use the thing. In fact no one talked about the license at all; you bought the physical thing and it was yours to use as you liked.
That's all more complex now, of course. But inasmuch as we're told that the reason a book (or CD) is so expensive is because of the intellectual property rights you're licensing, if we assume that the physical+digital copy bundle would be used only by the purchaser, why should it cost any more than the physical copy alone? If what I'm paying for is the license, why is it much more expensive to get two instances of the data instead of one? Shouldn't the digital version be practically free once you've paid the licensing fee?
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Date: 2010-03-23 05:07 pm (UTC)(Having compared well-laid-out commercial ebooks with free raw text from Project Gutenberg, I'm actually happy to pay a little more. Free raw text is ugly, doesn't link properly, and is often badly paginated.)
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Date: 2010-03-24 11:57 am (UTC)I agree that that design work is valuable. I just don't think that it's worth $5/copy. Because it only has to be done once, ever, no matter how many copies are sold.
The bandwidth to serve it to you? Compared with the cost of physically transporting a book? Negligible. A few cents.
The permanent storage space to store all your metadata is on your device, not on their servers, I think you'll find. (I could be wrong on that. I haven't looked into how that stuff is handled.)
Given that I've already paid the author by buying the physical book, I'd be willing to pay a dollar or two for the digital version. But not $6
(Gutenberg texts aren't really a good comparison, I feel. Because they are scanned from physical sources, there is a lot of extraneous crap that has to be removed. A new book as received from an author contains only the text. No pagination, page numbers, running heads, Chapter heads, thumb prints, colophons, marginalia.... Removing all that extra data to get back to the bare text takes a lot of work, which is done by volunteers with vastly varying levels of skill. Then someone can start adding layout data for ebook readers.)
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Date: 2010-03-23 07:55 am (UTC)I'm hazarding a guess that whatever the benefit is, it has a fairly narrow monetary value range. You might not be buying as many of the non-combo pairs as you would be if they were offered as a combo discount. Is it fair to say then, that you believe the publishers would make up in volume what they would lose in straight out revenue per unit?
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Date: 2010-03-23 05:21 pm (UTC)I don't know whether it would actually make any sense, financially, to the publisher, but I suspect I am not the only person who would like to have the book in two formats but don't want to pay full price twice. (At very least other people on my flist seem to agree.) If that's the case, the publisher has the potential to turn one $20 sale into a $25 sale, or one $8 sale into a $12 sale, thus getting more $$ out of a customer who would otherwise not give them any more money for a particular book.
But I don't know if it would make sense to them, as I'm not an expert in the finances of publishing. It would just be nifty for me.
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Date: 2010-03-23 09:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 04:28 am (UTC)