Ask HN: If I buy a physical book why is the eBook not free? Genuine question. I understand there may a small marginal cost to host a ebook site for downloads, but other than that what are the drivers that disincentivize this practice? |
Ask HN: If I buy a physical book why is the eBook not free? Genuine question. I understand there may a small marginal cost to host a ebook site for downloads, but other than that what are the drivers that disincentivize this practice? |
"You bought my book, and because of your support, I am able to make a living as an artist. It means a lot. PS. if you want to read the ebook, it is included in your purchase of a physical copy. Press "View content" to download. However, I recommend waiting for the real deal."
If I turn it around, what would you appreciate most from an author in terms of extra content?
Publishers may have to renegotiate their existing contracts with authors to include ebook downloads and that costs time and money although that doesn't stop them from adding that language to new contracts so... 100% greed really.
I do appreciate the approach you took with your books! If the big guys tried half as hard as you did we'd all be better off.
All their books are amazingly high quality, and they always give you a free ebook license (aka all updates/revisions that are published later) once you bought a physical copy.
As a DJ it's great to have both digital and physical.
I've seen some places that will bundle an eBook with a print copy at a discount.
More than a few books I've bought from Lulu.com had a note in the first few pages with a URL to download an eBook or PDF copy.
I've also emailed authors and asked them for an eBook copy of the book with proof of purchase.
There are non-trivial implications associating a digital resource with the dynamics of physical ownership.
What happens when you sell or give away the physical book?
What happens when a library lends out the book?
Answers can be contrived but the concerns sufficiently inhibit wide adoptions of this pattern.
If someone has time, use AI to select from manuscripts and create multiple editions for them. I should be able to buy a book once and then get a version for the ipad, for the phone, a physical book and an audiobook (the whole set) with unique elements in each of them taking advantage of the medium and the device.
It's so dumb the way publishing and licensing is done right now.
And no, self publishing doesn't work because filters are important and quality control has to be maintained.
This is why the Internet Archive is fighting the Controlled Digital Lending issue in court; if all books are ebooks, libraries can no longer be libraries due to onerous publisher control, and culture is locked up in perpetuity (life+whatever in your country of copyright dystopia). You have to fix the delta between how the physical book and the ebook are treated legally.
TLDR Without physical media, there is no first sale doctrine. Everything is licensed, and locked up under license terms.
Do you want paperback books to cost $100? Because that's basically what you're demanding if you want all that other stuff free with every purchase.
Given text X = Create derivates of X.
The way people are using LLMs now is -> given limited number of words -> generate more words, which creates garbage.
But the compression idea is where LLMs really shine and should be explored to disrupt the industry.
And other pricing models can also be explored such as a netflix like subscription etc.
edit:
Just to further play with that idea, I think a big reason why https://standardebooks.org/ are quite popular is because they are simply making these books readable on devices. Just that much value is enough for the market.
When I say "simple check" just create a hash for the game session, and if youre playing a multiplayer game - check the session hash, if they match, they are using the same license.
Else, play along.
Cost is not the driving factor in pricing for most things. Value to the user is. Presumably in book sales enough people buy both formats to make it worthwhile charging the full price twice rather than using the ebook as a marketing tool to drive physical book sales.
https://www.uphe.com/faq/digital-hd-with-ultraviolet-faqs
I was able to redeem several of these from used discs I bought for a few cents to a dollar each.
For some context, after publishing my first book with O'Reilly, I decided to start a small publishing business in an effort to capture more revenue as well as experiment with continuous publishing (you buy one edition, I keep it up to date for a couple of years). I've written three books, with the last (Bulletproof TLS and PKI) being the best and the only one still relevant.
When we first started, we offered paperback and ebook options, with ebook free with paperback purchase. We had 3 virtual warehouses in the US, UK, and Europe. It was fun for a while, but we lost money on every paperback sale as we couldn't compete with Amazon on shipping costs (plus additional overhead of dealing with shipping problems). You have to pay your printer, shipping costs to the warehouses, order fulfilment, and shipping costs. Then insurance when something goes wrong, even if it's not our fault.
At some point we stopped selling paperback books, but we continued to offer free ebooks with a proof of purchase. This, too, ended up being a money-losing venture, because we make little money on each book, with most of the money going to the printer (print on demand is great, but expensive, and Amazon takes 40% of the list price.)
Today, we sell ebooks on our web site, and paperbacks via Amazon. We're nice people so we may give you a free ebook if you ask, but that's not a good way to run a business. It's fortunate, then, that we're not in it for the money.
To sum up it up: Amazon is the dominant sales channel. If they offered paperback and ebook distribution (Kindle, pub, and PDF—mandatory if you care about the user experience), we'd happily sell only through them and give everyone a free ebook with paperback purchase. We'd give Amazon the standard 40% (the minimum for paperbacks, not sure that it is for ebooks these days).
(Bundling the paper and digital products also could lead to “If I buy a physical book, and don’t want the ebook, why isn’t that cheaper?”, but such a very limited bundling of products, I think, is a much lesser concern)
Why?
Obviously it'd nice if you could, but there's no reason why a publisher should give up sales to people who buy a game multiple times just to make your life more convenient.
Found the MBA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
(although he does have a pretty cool site: https://ooer.com/ - so I'm sure he cant be all bad... :-)
But how do you handle tracking purchases across even Steam, whatever Windows gaming store Microsoft has, several generations of Xbox, several generations of PlayStation, a few different Nintendo consoles, Mac App Store, iOS/iPad OS App Store, GOG, Epic Game Store, itch.io, etc?
I support the idea but it seems like a very difficult thing to keep track of, and I suspect every one of those stores wants some money too.
Sounds simple - but hard.
Extrapolating “often, if not always” from one niche publisher is quite a stretch.
Random House, for example, does not do this.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/713318/wonka-by-roa...
Neither does Simon & Schuster.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Icebreaker/Hannah-Gra...
But, re-reading the top question now, I see that it's not specifically about technical literature.
Not sure what the situation is today but, early on, we had to give up 70% of the list price if we wanted Amazon to sell our digital books. It's just mind-boggling.
And that's on top of the suboptimal user experience, because you can't sell a PDF via Amazon, and the Kindle toolchain is just awful. We have our publishing pipeline automated (DocBook to print-PDF, on-screen PDF, and EPUB); for a while we had bad Kindle/Mobi as well, but I don't think even that is possible today.
So, it's not only that Amazon gets a huge chunk of the money, you also have to accept the inferior quality of that particular distribution channel.
Something like fortnite, once you purchase the battlepass/skin on one platform they are linked to the account and available across all the other platforms the game is available on.
This model essentially poses big challenges with physical media and game preservation. Puts the user at the mercy of the publisher.
IIRC Ubisoft pulled the plug on "The Crew" which is online only at the moment and is scheduled for deprication March of this year!
With regards to physical media, I think the game can skip the licence check on the account itself for the base game if it was launched from a disc/cartridge.
I should, within my own hom, play the game on any device.
I have 5 high-end machines/laptops, a ps5 xbox, ps4, tablets and phones...
If I own a license - I should be able to play from any of these.
If I join a multiplayer game that is OUTSIDE my LAN, then do a session ID check - and if two+ clients connect to game...
Make sense?
