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? I've written a book that I sell as a physical copy and an ebook. I don't advertise this, but when they buy the physical copy they get sent the ebook for free with this message: As an avid reader, this is truly appreciated as I agree with the philosophy that if you buy the book you are buying the content so you should have access to the digital content as well. However, do you find that people are either predominantly paper or predominantly digital so this offer ends up being only a nice "extra" gesture (a very appreciated one for the thoughtfulness)? That's an interesting question. I haven't asked my readers what they used the ebook for so I don't have any data on that. I've found that many of my readers have passed on their physical copy to friends after though, so maybe having an ebook to send to friends is appreciated as a quick look at whether you'll be interested to read or not. Again, I don't have data. If I turn it around, what would you appreciate most from an author in terms of extra content? The answer is 99% greed and 1% licensing. If you could download the ebook you might not buy the book again when you lose or damage it. If they give you the ebook you might not also pay for the ebook. You might crack the DRM and then upload the file somewhere or share it with a friend or family member. Plus the costs for storage and bandwidth are only mostly negligible. 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 am not convinced that it's greed. See my longer reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882694. We tried our best and wasted a lot of effort in an attempt to do what's right, and still failed in the end. I appreciate that we're an outlier and a tiny speck in the publishing world. It seems like your problems were with amazon and the costs of printing, not the costs of including ebooks with a purchase. It may be that paperback sales aren't always profitable, and it's certainly true that amazon is ripping off sellers, but since offering the ebook download doesn't add much cost (especially for a major publisher) and even you are able to do it (on demand at least) it seems viable which brings us back to the major publishers simply chasing greater profits. For for small company, that kind of penny pinching may be totally understandable. 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. Yes, it's essentially Amazon. But what can we (or anyone) do about it? 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. I'm still carrying a glimmer of hope that the FTC will step up, follow through, and put an end to some of amazon's more abusive practices. Yeah this is annoying. Personally I think it’s fine to “pirate” books or music which I already own on physical media, but I wish you didn’t have to As a book author and publisher, I don't mind if you do. I would give you the ebook for free if I could [cost-effectively]. I'm a huge fan of nostarch press because of this. 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. You can sell the physical book on secondary market and keep the ebook. Bandcamp usually offers free downloads in numerous formats for customers who buy physical goods. As a DJ it's great to have both digital and physical. Amazon (sometimes I really want some music not on a proper site like BC) does it with music they have the digital rights for (and some they don't). They also do weird things like selling CDs that include the MP3s for cheaper than just the MP3s. Only once I needed the ebook of a huge book and when I contacted the author he sent me the download link. Awesome guy.
Story aside, I believe is 100% greed from the publisher. The authors don't usually get a lot of profit from it and also the general profit of the book market is very low (or at least in Argentina and Spain) O'Reilly used to have a program in place where you could get the eBook copy of any of your physical books for a few dollars extra, even books published long before modern-eBook sales were thing. 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. Creating an eBook that looks good on the current cohort of popular devices and platforms isn’t trivial. So there’s a cost to production (and a temporal aspect to shifting standards) 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. Ha, getting two books doesn't quite add up, imho. Now buyers have electronic version, and they can sell all those hardcopies to people who don't want to pay full price, so theoretically you're undercutting your own sales. I'm sure it's by no means one-for-one, but could be significant issue. Instead of telling somebody about a great book i read that they should buy, or i might buy them as a gift, i already have this extra book i got for free that they can have. But maybe it works out. Idk, why does my local library have a limited number of ebook copies to loan out? Why would the limitations of physical books be artificially imposed onto digital books? It's all about $$$ Publishing is one industry which needs to be disrupted massively. 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 a copyright law issue, not a publishing industry issue. First sale doctrine applies to the physical book, you only have a license to the ebook. Even if you were to "disrupt" publishing, they could change their benevolence at any time and no longer transfer ownership of the ebook. 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. I mean start a new publishing house which does all of that. Not use existing publishers. Relying on the benevolence and lifecycle of a single org in an industry is not a systemic or meaningful fix. Well a single org needs to start. Thats how all change happens. Just look at Tesla. Now everyone is doing electric cars. So you're demanding special features for every medium of the book? That sounds expensive to produce, especially if the publisher only has one sale to capture all of those costs. 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. I think it can be done far cheaper than you are imagining. The way LLMs are evolving now, I think they are great for exactly this thing. 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. Similarly, and I know they are entirely different development pipelines - when I buy a game, I should be able to play it across my platforms; I Buy a PC game thats also available on PS/Xbx etc... I should just not be able to play it simultaneous across platforms. Which is a simple check. 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. when I buy a game, I should be able to play it across my platforms 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. Microsoft's first party games as well as a lot of AppStore games to this. But I agree that a publisher would only do this if they have to. Sony is not even thinking about this. Minecraft does this, and increasingly more games allow cross platform access, thought they are mostly free to play style games, but keep your in app purchases synced >>>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... :-) I think that's somewhat true if you buy certain games on Xbox, there's a Windows version available too. 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. Maintaining a database is not really black magic. Works in other areas also. The problem is to have the motivation doing this. And that's why this will never exist. The hash should have your license number, which is a hash of the version and date and platform that you paid for - your platform access should just be based on the parsing of the hash - whenever you join a session, it includes some version of this hash attesting to the original purchase/platform and stating the allowable platforms to run on - When joining/launching a game, the session hash is checked? Sounds simple - but hard. Join a session of what exactly? If I buy Firewatch <http://www.firewatchgame.com> from Steam, how would you propose I download it and play it on my Nintendo Switch, my PlayStation and my Xbox? Games are technically F2P, but the in-app purchases and progress are synced across platforms by the publisher. 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. Most games are not free to play. What I meant to say is that this is one of ways to do multiplatform ownership(in theory)! I have to admit the free to play games irritate me. I generally don’t want to play online at all. If I do I want to play with my friends only and no random people. I am referring to supressing using a single license on multiple platforms to multi player... 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? Eh disagree. It’s non-trivial to get games to work on more than one platform - maybe reduced cost on other platforms if you already own it on one, but free, no. 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? 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. I think this line of thought culminates in thinking that data with zero cost of duplication isn't a product that can be bought or sold. Just download it. The answer is that laws exist to protect propery and you must have property to be protected. Data isn't property, and so can't be protected from duplication. You're right in questioning the practice because it isn't logical. Anyone else remember when movies on DVD or Blu-ray had those digital download codes in the case that were always expired by the time you bought it? Ultraviolet they called it. 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. Even worse is audiobooks not coming with the e-books It makes highlights extremely limited, and annoying to work with. Amazon had what they called "Matchbook" for Kindle for a long time. Not sure if they still do. Any print book you bought came with a free Kindle copy. Because some people pay extra for the eBook + hardcopy combo (or buy the eBook and hardcopy separately). From a publisher's perspective, why leave that money on the table? You'll find that, often, if not always, if you buy directly from a publisher, the ebook will be free with the paperback purchase. (Manning is one example, not sure about others off hand.) However, if someone is buying your book from Amazon, the paperback is one SKU and the ebook is another, and there's no easy to way to include the book away for free. So I think that's basically your answer. 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). > You'll find that, often, if not always, if you buy directly from a publisher, the ebook will be free with the paperback purchase. (Manning is one example, not sure about others off hand.) 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... You're right. I answered in the context of technical books, where you do tend to get a free ebook if you buy the paperback directly from the publisher. Since that response, I checked a few of the other publishers and it's correct. But, re-reading the top question now, I see that it's not specifically about technical literature. Capitalism exploits vulnerabilities to extract and accumulate surplus value. Progress in technologies enables such exploration that was previously inaccessible or impractical. Because people will sell or giveaway the digital copy. Potential lost sales. Capitalism. If customers find that extra service valuable, as a publisher, why wouldn’t you charge for it? (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)
The reason I do this is because in my mind, they have paid for the content not the paper it's printed on, so the ebook is a part of the same purchase and is an extra convenience for someone who might want to read on their Kindle or phone. It's also a way to reward customers with extras, leaving them happier and more likely to leave a positive review. They also get all future revisions and editions emailed to them. "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."
