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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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)
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:
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.