Why don't books come with digital downloads?
Solving the question all readers are asking
There’s so much stupid shit out there: separate taps for hot and cold water. Bus stops without live schedules. Anything to do with Elon Musk.
But if there was one thing? One thing that riled me up and irked me on account of just how monumentally dumb it was? That’d be the fact there’s no way to buy a physical book and have it come with a discounted digital download.
I’m certain anyone with an ereader has longed for this.
There have been plenty of times when I bought an ebook, loved it enough that I wanted a physical copy, only to balk at the price of buying the same thing again. Or the opposite: picking up a monstrous, thousand-page hardback and wishing I had it on my ereader so I don’t risk being trapped under it like some sort of pathetic version of 127 Hours.
Here’s the question then: why don’t physical books come with a digital download?
It’s not like this doesn’t have a precedent. Lots of records came with a little slip giving you access to a digital download of the album, so why can’t books do the same? Or if that’s too much, what about paying a little bit extra when you purchase a physical book and getting an EPUB file bundled in?
What’s stopping this happening? People (AKA me) want this, so surely it’d make sense to offer this as a service.
Well, I did some digging to find out why.
The simplest answer is the most obvious: money.
Why bundle things together when you can sell them twice? Without concrete numbers about how many book buyers would actually use a novel package — which may be stats that borderline impossible to find accurately — it’s simply more profitable to sell physical and digital books separately at their retail prices.
Boring answer, I know. And the more I researched, the more keeping ebooks and physical books unbundled is probably a good thing.
The argument is two-fold.
First off, selling reduced ebooks with physical novels could harm authors’ income. Generally, writers don’t get a big cut of book sales. With paper novels, they make between 5% and 20%, with this rising to around 25% on digital ones.
Authors don’t make a lot of money. In fact, the median amount they earn from their books in the US is $10,000 a year.
Now, if you suddenly make digital books cheaper, writers take home less cash, and lots of that already minimal revenue gets washed away.
Secondly, cheaper ebooks may damage that industry in general. If people are used to paying miniscule amounts for digital novels, they’ll soon view standardly-priced versions as unreasonably expensive. This could gut the entire market, which, again, isn’t so great for people writing novels.
Plus, how many people would buy a physical book, then simply sell on the code for slightly less than the standalone digital version? Or visa versa?
There’s also a technical reason why we’ll likely never see book bundles become a thing.
When a novel is sold there are often a huge number of different parties involved. These include agents, publishers, distributors, and retailers, all of whom can vary from country to country.
What this means is it’s common for no single party to be looking after everything. For example, the business that has the digital rights for a book may be different to the physical publisher. Getting either of them to agree to less money simply won’t happen.
There may be some situations where all this is joined up and publishing houses could offer a book bundle service, but there’s really no way this could become a widespread phenomenon.
Ugh, why do you have to play me like this, reality?
Yeah, there are an array of very good reasons why digital and physical books won’t be bundled together, but… come on. Come on. Come on. Come onnn. Come on come on. Please? Come on. Come on.
Why not do it? For me?