Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by autoexec 901 days ago
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.
1 comments
ivanr 901 days ago
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.
link
autoexec 901 days ago
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.

link
ivanr 901 days ago
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.

link
autoexec 901 days ago
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.
link