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 | Flat

HarperStudio?

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?

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 ...

Threaded | Flat