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Originally Posted by Bob Russell
But I think publishers don't want you to give the book to another person.
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Generally, no, they don't. But if they thought the books were going to libraries, they might go along with it. Publishers are very keen to get their books into libraries, or so I've been told.
My thought was that publishers don't see the eBook market as a real book market at all, so I don't know why they would care if they gave away copies of eBooks, as long as they were making sales on the HC books.
But you're probably right, publishers will never want to do this, until we get a few innovative publishers (or authors) who see how this could help, rather than hinder their bottom line.
Actually, you know who will probably be the first to try this? Amazon. It will be part of the Kindle promotion. "Buy a book, get the Kindle version free...." as a limited-time means of selling more Kindles. And Amazon probably has the market clout to get many publishers to go along with it. They sell too many books for any serious publisher to want to try to argue about something like this. As you said, publishers hate the used-book market, and there is Amazon, suggesting that you sell your used books on the same page that the new ones are listed. I know at least one professional author who hates this practice, because she gets nothing from those resold books. (Which is another problem -- there ought to be a way to set up author accounts on Amazon so you can optionally choose to send a percentage of a used book sale to the author.)