When I buy a physical book in a store, why don’t they throw in a certificate that would allow me to download the book to an e-reader? Sure, they’re forgoing the possibility that I might pay separately for both book and e-book; but do people really do that? And moreover: if all the books I bought came with a free download, it would drastically increase the odds that I would buy an e-reader – because with the device, I could have easy access to the book I’m reading when I’m not in the house, without having to carry it around.
(Current system is to have one light paperback that I carry around and a hardback at home, and read in parallel.)
And even moreover: regular Nook users presumably don’t buy the e-book for $10 and then get the paperback for another $15. They just skip buying the paperback. But if they could buy both for $15, mightn’t they?
But maybe the point is that publishers don’t want to sell physical books, except when they’re forced to by virtue of some people not having e-readers yet. So that they actually lose money if their e-customers buy a book instead of an e-book. Is that how it is?
Update: Also, I realized it’s not completely obvious to me how you would sell the customer an e-book in a physical store. You can’t just have a “get your e-book free” code printed in the book — people would just share the codes.
I am totally with you on this one. Music companies do it with vinyl, let’s have book publishers do it with books. Please.
It would be easy to do this — just have a one-use code printed on the receipt and set it up so that once you use the code, you can’t return the book.
Errr. Ditto. One time codes are used all over the place (e.g. iTunes gift card redemption.) Personally I like the bundling idea. This is used to good effect in the Blu-Ray/DVD/online digital copy setup for movies.
One of my favorite science fiction writers, Lois McMaster Bujold, bundled with the hardback edition of the final book of a series an actual physical CD-ROM containing ebooks for (almost) the entire series.
Her publisher for the series though was Baen (probably the only major science fiction publisher that offers DRM-free ebooks for sale at all). I suspect that most publishers would be uninterested in bundling due to fears of piracy and the used market.
In the case of textbooks, those fears would probably be justified: many students would buy the bundle to use the ebook and sell the physical book immediately, leading to many fewer students students buying the book from the publisher. (Not that I have any sympathy for the publishers given the market failure they’re exploiting with regard to textbooks…)
I think Baen does that for most of its series. I know that they did it for David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, which has ~20 or so novels/collections within its universe.