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Any way to get a deal on paperback + ebook together?

chrinFinity

chrinFinity

Captain
Captain
I'm a habitual collector and reader of paperbacks and hardcovers, I have a pretty impressive collection and intend to continue collecting as I read the new books (as I've always done).

However, I've recently discovered I far prefer to read new books on my kobo ereader rather than the paperback editions (usually due to the font size being too small in the print editions, especially David Mack and DRG III).

I want to support the authors and so I won't pirate, but I find it super grating paying twice for the same book each time, particularly when the ebook prices have gone up a lot lately from what they used to be (it seems).

Does any retailer give a deal where you buy the paperback and get the ebook edition added on as a package, for a reasonable price?
 
Half a decade or so ago, I thought this would become the dominant paradigm in publishing. Something like Amazon offering the mp3’s for free when you buy a CD. Alas, the sales of ebooks leveled off, and it never happened.

Even the free mp3 thing has significantly dialed back. Dammit!
 
Yep, I would also love this. Even some comics (for a while) offered a free digital code when you brought the hardcopy.
 
Amazon give you a download when you buy a CD. I suppose it's accepted that you'll rip it to an mp3 player anyway.

I'd have thought ebooks might do something similar,but nothing so far.

My (admittedly sketchy) understanding of things is that you MIGHT be able to download 'backup' digital copies from elsewhere without breaking copyright if you already own a hardcopy though, as you have already purchased the rights to the content.

Anyone advise ?
 
I think that would be a great idea. There are dvds that include a digital copy. I think a lot of people would jump on this, not even a free ebook but take off a dollar or two.
 
I seem to remember that Baen used to provide a dvd with (quite a few) ebooks on with their hardbacks. At the time I was still physical books only, but when I got my ereader, it gave me a chance to try other series that I hadn't read. I don't think they do anymore though.
 
Baen has a huge free digital library on their website where they have a ton of the e-book versions of the books as free downloads, I got the first Honor Harrington and Posleen War books there. It looks like the books on there might also be free through the regular e-book stores too, because the second Honor Harrington and Posleen War books are both free through Google Play.
 
Sophie74656 said:
Have you checked with your library? My township lets you borrow ebooks.
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Yes and that's good that libraries do this, but I prefer to own them so I can open them and refer to them at any time in the future. Like I can do with the books on the shelf, but only if I'm physically at home ;)
 
tomswift2002 said:
Wasn’t there a New Frontier hardcover that included a CD with PDF’s of all the NF books up to about 2006?
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I went to my shelf, and you're right! I found it in the back of Stone and Anvil -- But I'd have to tear the nice printed envelope right out of the book in order to get at it, which I wasn't inclined to do at the time I bought it and certainly am not now. Especially if they are PDF as you say, and not proper epub files.

CD-Rom though?? I mean I know it was 2003, but did Simon and Shuster not have a bloody website?
 
chrinFinity said:
I went to my shelf, and you're right! I found it in the back of Stone and Anvil -- But I'd have to tear the nice printed envelope right out of the book in order to get at it, which I wasn't inclined to do at the time I bought it and certainly am not now. Especially if they are PDF as you say, and not proper epub files.

CD-Rom though?? I mean I know it was 2003, but did Simon and Shuster not have a bloody website?
Click to expand...
According to Memory Alpha the files are compatible with Adobe Reader 3.0 only.
 
chrinFinity said:
OMGGGGG yuck.

Although to be fair to Simon & Shuster in 2003, wikipedia seems to indicate that epub didn't come into use until at least four or five years later.
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I don't have the book, so I don't know for sure what files are on the disc. But we are talking 15 year old files, so I'm sure there is someway to get them to work on more modern computers (and if they are PDF's, then they should be able to open in any modern Acrobat program).
 
I can still open the PDFs from Stone and Anvil on my Mac today, for what it's worth. Unfortunately, they're pretty inaccurate. I have no idea how they were done, but there are a lot of typos and other problems that weren't present in the print edition. It's fine for checking my memory on some line or plot point, but I'd definitely be frustrated if I tried to read them straight through.

Here, I just opened "Once Burned." Dig the four missing lines.

Screen Shot 2018-06-26 at 8.34.43 PM.png
 
Bad OCR (Optical Character Recognition, by which photos or image scans of text are re-interpreted by a computer to be spit out in a text format). It's typical of the era, these were evidently scanned from existing printed copies rather than produced based on the original manuscript. As for why, that's anybody's guess.
 
Are they just regular PDFs? I've been able to upload regular PDFs to both Kindle and Google and read them fine. I've been pulling comics off of the DVD and reading them through the Google Play Books app for a while now.
 
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