The following question is deceptively simple, and we urge you to take your time responding. How much time?  Three or four months. You’ll need that much.  A lot rides on your answer.

Here’s the question:

When you purchase a print book you should be able to get the e-book for…

• a) the full combined retail prices of print and e-book editions
• b) an additional 50% of the retail price of the print edition
• c) an additional 25% of the retail price of the print edition
• d) $1.00 more than the retail price of the print edition
• e) free

The subject of this little quiz is bundling, a common marketing tactic in which two or more products are packaged and sold at a single price. In this case the package is a printed book plus its e-book iteration.

As simple as it sounds, bundling is shaping up to be the battleground for clashing publishing philosophies, and the time will soon come when publishers will have to choose one of the above strategies and put it into effect. Misjudging consumer attitudes could prove to be a big mistake and possibly a ruinous one.

The essence of bundling is to offer customers a discount for selecting the combo instead of the individually priced components, so choice a) above is a non-starter.  But choices b), c) and d) reflect just how aggressive a discounter wants to be and the various thresholds at which consumer resistance is expected to melt.  A good argument can be made for each and as the bundling issue warms up you can expect to hear them all endlessly debated.

Yet even the cheapest package – a dollar or even less than a dollar over the cost of the print edition – may not suffice to capture the consumer’s fancy. Why? Because many people believe they’re entitled to get the e-book free with purchase of the print book. How large is public support for that position?  We need to take a poll to find out, but if anecdotal reports are any indication, they may be in the overwhelming majority and they are unquestionably the most vocal. You will certainly hear their outpouring of joy when one publisher steps up to offer a print and e-book combo for the price of the print edition alone.  Our own prediction? Free will become the standard, and even ten cents above free will be a competitive disadvantage.

Economic factors aside, consumer negativity toward double-charging is a contributor to piracy. Comments sent to us in response to postings about piracy strongly suggest that the public expects digital versions of books to be tossed in for nothing when a printed book is sold, and if it isn’t tossed in, many of those customers will feel no compunctions about downloading an unauthorized copy. They simply feel entitled to it. Libertarian spokespeople like Cory Doctorow have articulated this sense of entitlement, and though some feel that their arguments go too far, there is a solid core of realism in their position. We can condemn the immorality of consumer attitudes ’til the cows come home; and we can (quite reasonably) complain that if people were willing to wait for the paperback reprint they should be willing to wait for the e-book reprint. It makes no difference: the public’s sense of entitlement creates an environment susceptible to the allure of piracy.

With so many sound arguments in support of heavily discounted bundles, why have we seen so little of it in book marketing? The answer is that it is harder to assemble print/e-book packages than it looks.  Publishers that control both formats are in the best position to do it but the technology is not yet in place.  Customers purchasing the latest James Patterson or Nora Roberts novel in a bookstore have no simple way to download the e-book in the same transaction. The publisher might offer a discount coupon but that requires a number of steps  and clicks that discourage a quick and easy procedure.

What is wanted is a one-click experience: “Click here to order the print and e-book.” Such a deal might best be offered by a publisher on its website.  However, the price of that bundle might undercut the prices offered by retailers or e-tailers for the individual components, and for publishers to compete with their own retailers is to cut their own throats.

Amazon is in a good position to offer print/e-book bundles but hasn’t done so yet, probably because it recognizes the complexity of the issues.  Book pricing is already fraught with so much angst that adding bundling to the debate will undoubtedly induce cardiac infarction among book people already near apoplectic with worry.

For the record, we at E-Reads strongly support the position that the e-book version should be included free of charge with the purchase of one of our print editions and are working to overcome the technical obstacles to implementing our conviction.

We invite your comments and look forward to seeing the debate over bundling heat up on the next stretch of road to the future of books.

Richard Curtis

The fantasy swordsmen that populate Dave Duncan’s novels are among E-Reads’ bestselling books. Now comes Longdirk, a Highlands outlaw whose blade slices through foes like a farmer’s scythe.

In Demon Sword, the first novel in the “Years of Longdirk” trilogy, all of Europe is under the control of the Khan, whose conquering armies swept across the West in 1244. Scotland, in addition, lies under the heel of England. Young Toby Strangerson, a half-English bastard, reared by a witchwife, wants only to shed his hated “Sassenach” blood and free his beloved highlands.

Toby wields a sword as the outlaw Longdirk. The sword can cut down men like so many stalks of corn. But stranger winds are swirling and howling across the lochs, eldritch winds that are ridden by “hobs” and “wisps” and demons. The enemy Sassenach king is also a sorcerer. His demon soul needs a body and his Black Arts can free Europe from the Khan’s Golden Horde.

Demon Sword and its sequels Demon Rider and Demon Knight were originally published under the pen name Ken Hood but Duncan is stepping out from behind his shield.

Watch the Dave Duncan author page for release information about Demon Rider and Demon Knight. You’ll also see some two dozen fantasy treats from a brilliant master available for download or print paperback..

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s To The High Redoubt is an epic fantasy adventure by the creator of the widely-read series of novels about the immortal vampire Le Comte de Saint-Germain.

In his quest for power, Bundhi, Lord of Darkness and stealer of souls, has taken family, vision and freedom from Surata, the last surviving adept in tantric alchemy, before selling her into slavery in a distant land. But he has underestimated the depth of Surata’s power and he could not foresee that destiny would bring her a champion, Arkady, soldier of fortune and destined hero. As their mutual trust deepens and the wellspring of power from which Surata draws her magic is steadily revealed, the two form an unbeatable force as they challenge their enemy in the very heart of his empire.

E-Reads has begun publishing Yarbro’s Saint Germain vampire novels, so keep your eye on her author page for news of new releases.

Piers Anthony is best known for his long-running Magic of Xanth series, of which many titles have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Another immensely popular series is “Cluster,” and E-Reads is publishing it. Today we bring you the eponymous first novel of five.

The “Cluster” adventures are set in a future focused on colonization of distant planets. Sphere Sol is about 100 light years in diameter, centered on the Earth’s sun. Surrounding this sphere are similar ones centered on another star such as Polaris or Canopus. Colonization is accomplished by instantaneous teleportation, called matter transmission or mattermission. Cryonically preserved colonists are sent out in “freezer” ships.

Because of the difficulty of colonization and the smaller population bases, all spheres suffer spherical regression– that is, the greater the distance from source star to colony, the lower the level of technology that survives. Social organizations regress backward to historical periods of the home planet’s past. Outworld, Sphere Sol’s farthest colony, is populated by paleolithic tribes who hunt with flint spears and make fire. Colonists know about the interstellar empire and the home worlds “mattermit” government and security personnel to all colony worlds.

Every living thing has a Kirlian aura that can be measured. Through transfer, a refinement of mattermission technology, the mind and personality of individuals with high aura can be sent to animate a body physically distant but a hosted aura fades at the rate of about 1 unit per Earth day and higher-Kirlian individuals last longer and thus have more freedom of movement.

The first three novels in the sequence, Cluster, Chaining the Lady and Kirlian Quest form a linked trilogy. Thousandstar and Viscous Circle come later and take place in the time sequence between the second and third volumes of the original trilogy.

Look for all five titles on the Piers Anthony page of the E-Reads website. And visit Piers Anthony’s website

RC

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) have released e-book sales stats for June 2010, and they’re a tad soft, but only contrasted to the dizzying triples and quadruples of recent note.

Trade e-book sales were $29,800,000 for June, a 219% increase over June 2009 ($13,600,000). Q2 sales took a slight dip to $88.7 million from the $91 million reported by the industry in Q1

Just to keep “soft” in perspective, bear this in mind: sales for the first six months of 2010, totaling 179.7 million, exceeded total sales for the entire year of 2009 and sextupled sales for 2007, a mere three years ago! [Italics, exclamation point, and slightly hysterical tone provided by E-Reads]

Red line =first six months of 2010: $179.7 million

All of 2009: $ 169.5 million
All of 2008: $ 53.5 million
All of 2007: $ 31.7 million

IDPF reminds us that:

* This data represents United States revenues only
* This data represents only trade e-book sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
* This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
* This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
* The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
* The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is “All books delivered electronically over the Internet or to hand-held reading devices”

RC

Whether you’re entering college or a returning student who’s been burned by paying a premium for textbooks and selling them for a fraction of their value, you will bless Tara Siegel Bernard for her New York Times article on how to shop for textbooks.

Bernard points out that “Federal rules that went into effect in July may help ease the pain. Publishers can no longer bundle their textbooks with accompanying materials like workbooks, and they must reveal their prices to professors when making a sales pitch. Colleges, meanwhile, are now required to provide students with a list of assigned textbooks during course registration, which allows for more time for shopping before classes begin.”

Here are some tips Bernard garnered from an interview with Nicole Allen, textbook advocate at the Student Public Interest Research Groups:

Free Books. You can find them in the Google Books database. Another source is Project Gutenberg.  There are problems with this approach (incomplete or poorly reproduced texts, page numbers that don’t correspond to course requirements, etc.) but still worth a shot.

Downloads and e-texts: Check out ManyBooks.net, for instance.  E-texts are (or should be) cheaper than their paper counterparts, but you won’t be able to print them out, and at this stage of the Digital Revolution most students prefer paper textbooks.  See E-Textbooks? Another School Makes Them Sit in a Corner)

Open Source Textbooks “Students who are assigned open source textbooks can usually download a copy for free, or they can buy a printed and bound version for $20 to $40,” Ms. Allen said. See FlatWorld.

The use of so-called open source textbooks, offered by companies like Knowledge, is also on the rise. “Students who are assigned open source textbooks can usually download a copy for free, or they can buy a printed and bound version for $20 to $40,” Ms. Allen told the Times reporter.

ETextbooks Are you the type of student who is completely at ease reading on your computer or iPad and won’t be tempted to print anything out? Then consider using eTextbooks, which are digital versions of textbooks that usually sell for about half the full retail price. Another site to visit is CourseSmart.com, which Bernard described as “a consortium of major textbook publishers that provides eTextbooks that allow students to highlight and take notes electronically.” But once again, printing options may be restricted.

Renting Some schools now rent textbooks. An outfit called Rent-A-Text “has teamed with 800 college bookstores“ to drive costs down to about half of the list price. You can even highlight if you don’t get too messy about it. There’s also Chegg.com, which Bernard says “has a reputation for being the Netflix of book rental companies.” [Note however that as of this writing we were unable to open the link to Chegg.com.] Other outfits mentioned are BookRenter.com, CampusBookRentals.com, ECampus.com (“We know you’re broke. We make you less broke.”), Textbookrentals.com and Collegebookrenter.com.

Buying Online Bernard lists Campusbooks.com and Bigwords.com for new, used, and rental textbooks. She also reminds us that international editions can be cheaper. Another tip is to look for coupon codes on such sites as PromotionalCodes.com, CouponWinner.com, and PromoCodes.com.

Selling Your Textbooks “You usually won’t get the best deal from your campus bookstore. But if the store knows it will need the same book the following semester,” says Bernard, you might have some bargaining power to recover part of your original investment. “Campusbooks.com doesn’t purchase used books,” she informs us, “but it has a neat search engine that lists who’s buying and how much they’re willing to pay.” Also, you can cut out the middle man by listing your available textbooks on Facebook, Craigslist or student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups).

Finally, you might consider…

Donating Your Textbooks. For the charitable or green-minded student, consider donating or selling your texts to BetterWorldBooks.com. According to their website, as of this writing they have raised $8,554,339.14 to combat global illiteracy and saved 34,208,429 books from global landfills. We don’t know whether there are tax writeoffs for such donations but it’s definitely worth asking your accountant.

For details, read Bernard’s article in full: How to Find Cheaper College Textbooks

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Can you produce a vook?  What skills will you require to make one?  And will you be more of a writer when you finish it?

This essay was written in the mid-1990s, but except for a few dated references like CD-ROMs, which I’m going to leave in for the fun of it, it seems to be completely relevant to what is happening in the media this very day.

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How can you possibly call yourself an author if you can’t process digitized full-motion video signals on your computer, accelerate your image-compression manager to thirty frames per second, and enhance your video with full stereo sound?

The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works. As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century’s definition of “author” will be as far from today’s definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.

The evolution of authors from unimedium creators to multimedia producers has been gaining momentum since the replacement of manual typewriters with electric ones, a phenomenon that any living soul in his or her mid-thirties or older has witnessed. The addition of computerized memory converted these dumb and passive typing machines into utilities possessing the potential for genuine partnership with writers. Each refinement in memory capacity, miniaturization, automation, and audiovisual display exponentially accelerated the typewriter’s curve away from mere laborsaving device and toward a purely organic extension of the writer’s mind.

At this point in time, we are at a place on the curve where typewriting has been supplanted by word processing, and word processing, in turn, has advanced into desktop publishing. This means that writers are capable of assuming the role of publishers in every function except distribution of their works to the consumer, and even this condition is on the way to being satisfied with the ongoing creation of electronic networks delivering intellectual creations directly to users.

The closer writers come to realizing that potential, the greater will be the pressure on them to expand their skills beyond effectively delivering the written word in print mode. It will be incumbent on them to navigate, and enable computer users to navigate, through a world of sights, sounds, colors, action, information, and special effects. The introduction of the optical disk, with its almost unimaginable memory and versatility, into the writers repertoire, makes their ascent to the next rung of evolution a foregone conclusion. But what is that rung, and how many others loom above it?

Technological growth is seldom achieved without a price, however. The same refinements that liberated writers from some kinds of concerns have saddled them with others. Our relationship with text has become complicated, if not obscured, by our need to master new writing tools. More and more of our creative energy has become dedicated to the selection of hardware, software, peripherals, and options. Each improvement challenges us not to become better writers but to become better engineers.

To read this essay in full click here.

Richard Curtis

To Cory Doctorow, capitalism is something that other people are conspiring to do to him, and DRM is the weapon they’re doing it with.

His antipathy to kapitalizm is understandable in view of his Trotskyite upbringing, but history has demonstrated that beneath every socialist’s flesh beats the heart of a capitalist. The latest installment of his Publishers Weekly series tracing the odyssey of his self-published book bolsters the impression that if he could turn the tables he’d be as exploitative as any publisher that ever kneed an author in the groin.

His article is called Doctorow’s First Law, suggesting that his quest for truth in publishing has at last reached bedrock. What is the First Law? “Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won’t give you a key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.”

We suppose that Doctorow’s discovery will seem like a blinding epiphany to some of his acolytes, but for anyone who has been around the book industry track for more than a decade it comes as something of a Duh. Warfare between author and publisher, and between publisher and retailer, has existed since the earliest recorded words. Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement, reported in the New York Times Book Review that “Horace, the tame poet of the emperor Augustus, made the obvious comparison: booksellers were the rich pimps of Roman publishing and authors, or even the books themselves, were the hard-working but humiliated prostitutes.” (See In Ancient Rome, Every Author Was on a Roll).

Doctorow is blessed to have come into the publishing world long after the bitter campaigns of postwar 20th century when screwing authors was a blood sport. Perhaps a better First Law would be that 21st century publishing is a collaborative effort among three capitalistic entities: authors, publishers and booksellers. Though there are occasional imbalances, none of them can so dominate that they drive the others out of business. Such is the complex ecology of our enterprise that if you destr0y one you destroy all.

Doctorow writes that he is “more than happy to offer my otherwise free books for sale in any vendor’s store, of course, but only if the vendors agree to carry them on terms I feel I can stand behind as an entrepreneur, as an artist, and as a moral actor.” Well, Mr. Doctorow, publishers have terms too, and if you listen to them long enough you come to understand why they need to impose them.

All economic systems are about control of capital.  Cory Doctorow is no different – he’s just more entertaining and colorful about it.  Robin Hood was colorful too, but withal he was an entrepreneur who happened to redistribute capital via the business end of a longbow.

Read Doctorow’s First Law.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

After Marco Vassi, the brilliant erotic writer and a dear personal friend, lost his struggle with HIV I paid tribute to him in an essay, An Intrepid Voyager to a World of Searing Erotic Fantasies. And I vowed to reissue his books  when I launched our E-Reads program. We have fulfilled that promise with release of ten of his works.  The latest is The Erotic Comedies .

The Erotic Comedies is a collection of fables and memoirs by America’s foremost erotic writer does for our era what Boccaccio, Swift, and Balzac did for theirs – exposes the human animal in all its absurdity. Vassi takes erotic writing to its extremes and then further, unraveling the seams of our most secret fantasies. His subjects are radical lesbians, male supremacists, transsexuals, establishment normals, therapists, revolutionaries, gynecologists, gurus and even God – created in Vassi’s own image, of course – all of whom are reduced to the ridiculous in a shower of bawdy laughter.

Capturing the sizzling vitality of the erotic upheaval of his age while also grasping its peculiar pretensions, he creates a gallery of unforgettable characters who are only ourselves become somehow larger than life. As with other great humorists, Vassi has a serious purpose: to explode the prevailing myths so the reader is forced to respond to his or her eroticism with unprogrammed intelligence. When everything from monogamy to coprophilia is presented from the perspective of the cosmic horse-laugh, no one can avoid finding his or her own role in the human comedy.

Richard Curtis

In Survivor, the coda to William W. Johnstone’s bestselling “Ashes” series, Jim LaDoux, the grandson of the legendary General Ben Raines, has seen his grandfather and the last of his family die in the beginnings of the plague that sweeps the world, leaving many millions dead and a civilization struggling to survive and re-build after yet another in a what seems like an endless series of crippling blows.

LaDoux, having stayed alone for six months in the isolated Idaho cabin built by his ancestors, realizes that he must get out and find life and hope or he will surrender to despair and death. As he starts traveling, he finds a young woman, Bev, who had been on a Believer mission and who has barely survived an attack by Rejects. The Rejects are a chaotic and violent movement of outcasts who have seen all the destruction and horror of the last few years and have formed a single belief: that there can be no God in a world such as they’ve lived in.

As they travel together, they find love for each other and they have to deal with members of both sides of the struggle and then encounter yet a third faction, the Rebels, who believe that Ben Raines’s set of beliefs is still alive and that faith, courage and firepower combined can beat back the evil that threatens to end the world.