coraa | (no subject)

Entry tags:

publishing,
thinky

(no subject)

I 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.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

HarperStudio?

Do they do that? That's good to know.

I think so, but the one book I have (they've been doing business as that imprint for about a year) was a free copy, so I haven't tried investigating how to get audio access.

Sorry that was so brief, earlier--I hit Post before I'd meant to, then decided the comment could stand as it was. :P

Only yesterday I noticed a small (5 title) non-fiction publisher doing just that: hardback: $20; e-book: $10, both: $25

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.

Hm. It'd have to be a deeper discount than that for me to want it.

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?

See, I don't mind paying on the order of $4-6 for an additional ebook copy because I know that a book, even an ebook, isn't just raw information. It's also something that requires physical labor: even an ebook requires that you pay someone to do the physical design (font choices and etc. are not necessarily the same in an ebook as in the paper version, nor should they be for readability), someone to lay it out, and someone to proof the new layout, plus the bandwidth to serve it to the e-reader, plus, in the case of newer e-readers such as the Kindle or the Nook, the permanent storage and synchronization space for not only the text but also for my bookmarks, annotations, comments, last page read data, etc. Those things are not free, and I'm willing to pay a little extra for the extra convenience of having them handy.

(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.)

Edited 2010-03-23 17:09 (UTC)

Exactly! My only ebook "piracy" ever was when I was in an online RPG based on an author's book series, back in college. I owned all the books in physical copy, and most were bought new (a luxury for me in college, when I had no money). But I also wanted an electronic version so that I could search for certain terms when trying to resolve a canon question. Since the ebooks were not at that time available legitimately anywhere, I did download them, without much qualm. But that was a case where I probably would have paid for a bundle.

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.

We are disagreeing only on price.
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.)

Why? As in, what is the benefit to you, that you're willing to pay more for it?

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?

Amazon sort of does this for some textbooks--you get the paper version for $100 or whatever and an online electronic version for another $15 or $20. I bought the e-version to go with one of my glacier textbooks. I haven't looked to see if they've extended it to include Kindle editions, but it seems like a logical next step.

I totally would, too. If I'm going to pay full price, I want a hard copy (soft/hard cover), not an ebook. But I'd happily pay a bit more for an ebook bundled in.

I would love that too!

O'Reilly does that, but I'm not sure it's the kind of book you buy a lot of ...

I read on my Kindle and in paper format in different ways and situations. The Kindle goes with me when I travel, and also gets tucked in my bag when I leave the house in case I run into an unexpected delay where I'd like something on hand to read. I also read it around the house, sometimes. Paper books I like for reading in the bath and other situations where they might get messy (reading while stirring a pot of soup or spaghetti sauce for dinner, for instance), and also so I can hand it to my boyfriend to read, lend to a friend, whatever. It's not worth paying full price twice, but it's worth a certain amount of money to be able to switch back and forth from electronic to paper.

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.

Oh, cool.

marvinalone says O'Reilly does that too. It does make sense for academic/technical books: the value of having both a copy you can prop open next to your computer and a copy you can search/annotate is pretty clear.

I do some, so that's good to know! Hopefully it will catch on.

Pragmatic does too. (I guess it's not surprising that the tech publishers are ahead of the game in ebooks.)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only