Way too cool....

[MartinParish]

Who would have thought it....the Campaigns of Napoleon by David Chandler is available on Kindle! I have it in hardcover, so I'm not planning to buy the Kindle version, but for anyone who doesn't have it and enjoys military history this is an absolutely awesome book - the single best account of the Napoleonic Wars. What does bother me a little, though, is that the Kindle price is nearly the same as the hardcover price...I wonder how the publisher justifies charging $64 for a Kindle edition?

[Excuse Me, Miss]

$64...that's just ridiculous! I have only purchased textbooks for the price in hardback and wouldn't even consider in Kindle.

[Thrasher]

I cannot see myself paying $50+ for ebook versions of textbooks if you cannot later sell them as "used"

[bgalbrecht]

That might be a fair price. I don't know how much it usually takes to convert an older book, which probably doesn't have a nice electronic source file that can be easily converted to Kindle/ePub formats, but let's say $5,000, since it's a nearly 1200 page book, with illustrations. If it's not a book commonly used as a textbook, it might only sell a few hundred copies, which would barely make the publisher a profit. There is a review of the Kindle edition, though, and it's a poorly done version. No table of contents, and the resolution of the maps is poor.

[koland]

Sounds more like they spent $50 and hope to make it all up in one copy.

$5,000 would be a good investment, were it well priced, as it could easily sell not just hundreds of copies, but thousands, if priced correctly (sell a thousand and you can price it at $10 for the publisher to more than make the investment back; price it low enough and even a non-fiction title like this can sell hundreds a month, or at least each semester).

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by koland

Sounds more like they spent $50 and hope to make it all up in one copy.

$5,000 would be a good investment, were it well priced, as it could easily sell not just hundreds of copies, but thousands, if priced correctly (sell a thousand and you can price it at $10 for the publisher to more than make the investment back; price it low enough and even a non-fiction title like this can sell hundreds a month, or at least each semester).

Don't forget that the agency publisher is probably only getting about 30-40% of the cover price on an ebook (the rest goes to author and retailer), so it's going to take about 1500-2000 copies just to cover the costs of production, at $10 a copy. I don't know, do history professors include ebooks on their required reading lists yet? Back when I was in college a few decades ago, those professors tended to be technophobes. While it's probably an interesting read, I'm not sure that it would have enough of a draw with the general public to sell that many copies in a year.

[Worldwalker]

I'd buy it if it were $10. There are a lot of casual history buffs who would.

[neilmarr]

$64.00 is perfectly fair and reasonable. What's your grouse, Martin? It does come with a free Kindle thrown in, I assume. Cheers. Neil

[BVLarson]

If it is too much, people will certainly use their wallets to vote it down. It does sound stiff, however, to me. This certainly is the opposite of a "freebie" post!
-bvl

[Marcy]

$64 is not unreasonable for a specialty book of this type and length. This isn't a textbook but a niche book for buffs.

I spent over $1000 on my 10-volume set of Roman Imperial Coinage and just spent $500 on the 4-volume set of SNG von Aulock. If I hadn't already bought these, I'd spend close to that for an ebook version so I wouldn't have to have a huge shelf of heavy books and could refer to them from anywhere. And even though I've bought it already, I would still buy an ebook version of RIC volume 5, even if it was $100 because that's my area of specialization.

This is not a simple fiction story folks.

I do agree this post doesn't belong in the deals section. It's more a Newsy or Discussion item.

-Marcy

[AnemicOak]

For me this is the kind of book I'll still buy in paper. I have a lot of pbooks of a similar bent (and pricing) and find these are the kind of books I'm always flipping back and forth in and IMO readers just don't quite cut it yet.

That said I don't think the price is wholly unreasonable.

Originally Posted by Marcy

I spent over $1000 on my 10-volume set of Roman Imperial Coinage and just spent $500 on the 4-volume set of SNG von Aulock. If I hadn't already bought these, I'd spend close to that for an ebook version so I wouldn't have to have a huge shelf of heavy books and could refer to them from anywhere. And even though I've bought it already, I would still buy an ebook version of RIC volume 5, even if it was $100 because that's my area of specialization.

Are there legit e-versions of RIC that you know of? All I've seen are the PDF scans on the darknet.

[Marcy]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Are there legit e-versions of RIC that you know of? All I've seen are the PDF scans on the darknet.

Nope. And I would buy one if they had it available.

I have the darknet versions because it is seriously annoying to keep flipping back and forth between the index with the 100 different locations of a Gallienus ant with the legend ORIENS AVG or IOVA CONSERVA and those different pages to find a match. I keep my darknet pdf open to the index and look it up in my pbook.

I made myself a scanned copy of the Göbl index for the same reason.

-Marcy

Addendum: I would pay more than $100 for a linked copy of RIC 5. By that I mean an index where I can click on the page number and be taken right to the coin in question. I would then be able to hit "back" and go back to the index. That would save me much effort and would be worth probably double the price of the pbook to me.

[AnemicOak]

Yeah the RIC hard copies can be quite unwieldy. I'd love to see, as you say, a linked copy of them put out. I wonder how big the market would be for something like that.

[Marcy]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Yeah the RIC hard copies can be quite unwieldy. I'd love to see, as you say, a linked copy of them put out. I wonder how big the market would be for something like that.

Small. That's why they'd be expensive. I'd willingly pay for a subscription where you used a server as well. With such a small market piracy would be an issue.

-Marcy

[HarryT]

Likewise, I paid £250 (almost $400) for the "Oxford Latin Dictionary" (the definitive dictoinary of Classical Latin). Specialist books have small a market and will always be expensive. The OLD is never going to be sold for £10.