[ShellShock]

To start, what I do like about omnibus editions: they are much cheaper than buying the individual books.

Now, what I do not like:

They are sold as a single file (e.g., a single epub). For the A Song of Ice and Fire omnibus, this is 4500 virtual pages. I am not going to read through all this sequentially because I will probably be heartily sick of it half way through, and just the thought of those 1000s of pages still to go is quite a deterrent. I want a bit of variety so I mix things up by reading other books in-between the books in the omnibus.

Plus bigger books take longer to load and are generally slower on most ereaders.

I also like seeing the covers of the individual books in my library.

So this means I spend time splitting the omnibus epub into individual book files. Which is ironic because some minion at the publishers has had to spend even more time munging the individual books into the single omnibus. And I mean munge--with multiple stylesheets as the original books had their own styling.

The publishers seem to be still stuck in pbook thinking, where an omnibus meant another print run so it probably made sense to spend time creating a single book; I guess it is cheaper to print and distribute a single large omnibus book rather than many individual books (in a box set). But with ebooks it is actually cheaper for the publisher not to create an omnibus file--there is no additional cost because the individual ebooks already exist.

Perhaps the problem is for the retailers--how to package the individual ebooks (that they already have in their system) into an omnibus? Thinking of the Kobo web site, this could be done with coupons--buying the omnibus gives you a coupon for a discount on all the books in the omnibus. But now the onus has shifted from the publishers to the retailer to actually manage the omnibus.

Another idea would be for the publisher to provide the omnibus as a single zip file that contains the individual ebooks within it. I assume that this would work without too much change (if any) on the retailers' web sites.

Do any publishers or retailers do this (coupons/single zip)?