Why are books still behind the rest of the market

[Overread]

So think of music, TV and films. Three big markets that, like books, have recently undergone a big market shift from a purely physical product to one which comes in both physical and digital formats. However unlike books, they all also now offer free digital copies when people purchase physical copies of the material.

Those who want to purely own physical copies have the optional choice of using the digital (often on services like Amazon the digital is enabled at the point of purchase before the physical product has even arrived). It encourages the user to make use of multi-media interaction with the product and likely helps drive digital sales as users with reservations will be encouraged to sample the digital version without having to make a separate purchase.

So how come books don't do this yet. It would seem a very sensible and natural evolution of the market to allow physical book sales to come with a free ebook version of the same publication.

I wonder that the reason we don't see this yet is because of how Amazon dominates the ebook market through the Kindle; and I suspect amazon doesn't want to give up the potential profit from double purchases; since they already discount the sale price of their Kindle units to get htem into the market. I suspect that unlike music and films (which rely on 3rd party hardware but which are not exclusive to it); the fact that Amazon both has to sell hardware and software to enable the digital market to work might be hindering this.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Hugh Howey suggested this some years ago - but Big 5 publishers are actively resisting the move to digital, so as maintain existing print distribution networks and avoid being too dependent on Amazon.

I think Amazon would actively do it if they could - they know that availability = sales, as is shown for all the different distribution options they offer for ebooks, especially sharing, lending, text to speech, and audible upgrades.

 

[Onyx]

Probably because paper books aren't digital storage devices with room for an MP3 or a one-time encoded coupon. So such a process then becomes dependent on how the book is purchased, which would be bad for physical book stores.

 

[Vertigo]

I bought a programming reference book a few years back that did this. I bought the book from Amazon and inside was a sealed paper insert; once you opened this it revealed a 20x9 table of 9 character codes. I then went online to the specified website and entered the code at the row and column the site prompted me for and downloaded the epub version of the book. Simple effective and appreciated.

Also Baen used to provide a DVD/CD with any hard copy book you bought from them containing a significant portion of their SF catalogue in ebook form. I think they figured people would really want to get the paper book once they'd sampled the ebook.

Re the other forms of media it might be true now but it wasn't always so. Technically if you bought and LP and then taped it you were breaking copyright law and for a short while they overlaid an inaudible high frequency signal that interfered with the recording head to produce a very audible beat tone on the recording. I actually still have one of these LPs it was one of the Sky albums. Problem was that as soon as they started doing this people starting making and building filters that filtered the overload tone out. Very simple and rapidly made the whole exercise pointless. I'm still surprised that the ease of stripping the DRM hasn't yet similarly put them off using that.

 

[tinkerdan]

I honestly think for traditional publishers that it's their choice that has stymied things.

Pricing E-books too far below paper bound runs a risk of removing some paper bound purchases from the table(they really need certain costs paid for before they spread the E-books sales out all over with reduced prices).
Giving away E-books has a double whammy effect of losing potential sales of E-books, that you now give away, and also inviting your readers to get too comfortable with E-books and not buy the paper volumes.
Add to that the fact that traditional publishers seemed from the start to expect E-books to fail(what better way to prove than to price them out of existence).

However what puzzles me is that since they have E-book prices on parr with the paper bound editions, they could still give away an occassional E-book with the purchase of the paper edition and as long as they never reduce the price of the E-book then the combination of the two bundled would always be the better buy and it would give the reader the added extra benefit of having a different way to read.

So yes...why don't they think of that. (To be honest at least once I purchased an Honor Harrington novel Hard bound that had a pocket that contained the E-book in a couple of formats, so they do think of it occasionally.)

 

[Onyx]

Another factor in all of this is that ebooks don't really have an analog in other electronic media. Anyone can fill 400 pages with seemingly tolerable and grammatical sentences, then save the file, attach clip art and create an ebook. The traditional limiting factor to quality in media was the barrier to entry - the ability to make a clean musical recording, the cost of shooting and editing a film with actors, the cost of physically printing a book.

All those things are still true - publishers pay authors and incur large expenses to turn writing in books. But self published ebook authors can nearly give away their products - even quality products, making it appear that the $12 for a traditional publisher's ebook is inappropriately high. With so many authors and so little celebrity attached to writing, it becomes very difficult to draw the line between traditional and self published writing the way we would between a David Bowie MP3 and one from a some guy with a Casio keyboard. I'm not surprised publishers are struggling with how to value and package ebooks.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

There are some designs which simply resist digitalisation and digital culture. The book is one such, I think.

The other reason in my opinion is that music MP3s and downloaded films are a very different 'culture' than reading. We are moving from a world of readers to a world of watchers. This I suspect is a global shift caused by new media.

 

[Onyx]

There are some designs which simply resist digitalisation and digital culture. The book is one such, I think.

The other reason in my opinion is that music MP3s and downloaded films are a very different 'culture' than reading. We are moving from a world of readers to a world of watchers. This I suspect is a global shift caused by new media.

Very true. It is much more difficult to read a book if you have the kind of lapses in attention that are unimportant when passively enjoying most music. Most media is less demanding by virtue of either being less demanding or more attention holding, like video.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I think you're right to mention the attention-span thing. It sounds like a cliche, or fake news, but I think it exists, and may even be much more prevalent - especially in young people - than we realise. There is an increasing amount of concern about the mental health consequences of social media.