Do you think publishers will ever get behind the idea of selling a hardcover book with an e-book coupon inside? Before I got my nook I would usually get two hardcover copies of your books, one to be signed and never read (sit pretty on my shelf) and the second to be read and personalized. I still plan on buying two hardcover’s, but now prefer reading on my nook, but not sure if I want to spend another $15 for the convenience of keeping my book in my pocket and not having to remember what page I left off on.
I certainly hope so. I actually lobbied hard to get it for The Way of Kings .
The problem was not desire, the problem was logistics. However, Baen has this down already. (I believe they sold a recent Honor Harrington hardcover with a CD inside that included ALL of the previous books in ebook for free.)
In fact, if you like ebooks and want to support publishers doing more with them in an DRM free way, go support the Baen Free Library. (My publisher, Tom Doherty and founder of Tor, is a silent partner in Baen, so we might see something similar for Tor eventually.)
I will work hard to get the ebook-hardcover combo working. I don’t think it’s too far off from happening for popular books. (Where the printing costs of adding a CD are lowered by huge print runs.)
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.