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Originally Posted by rhadin
My experience is that it is preplanned to do a p and an e version and that the costs are spread over expected sales of both, not just over the pbook.
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Which is the correct way to look at it, from an accounting standpoint.
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Very true. The difficulty is that publishers do not divide the market into its component parts -- hardcover buyers, paperback buyers, and ebook buyers. Although there is some overlap in the sense that a hardcover buyer may also buy a paperback and/or an ebook, for the most part people tend not buy outside their preferred format. Thus a hardcover buyer will continue to buy hardcover even if the paperback or the ebook are also available. Price is not the consideration, esthetics and preferences are.
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Yep. People sensitive to price get the trade paperback or mass market paperback edition, and are willing to wait to get it.
Interestingly, hardcovers seem to be an increasingly large portion of books sold, with mass market editions often struggling. I've heard reports of MMPB editions with press runs of 15,000 copies, which would have been unthinkable not that long ago, and leaves me wondering is the publisher is doing more than covering direct costs.
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In my own case, I buy nonfiction in hardcover only, very rarely in ebook, and never in paperback. Fiction I buy only certain authors in hardcover and never buy them in either paperback or ebook, but the bulk of my fiction purchases are ebook. If it isn't in ebook, with the exception of a handful of preferred authors who I buy in hardcover, I simply do not buy the fiction book.
My wife, OTOH, buys paperback and only occasionally in hardcover and never in ebook. She dislikes the weight of the hardcovers and is only marginally interested in ebooks and thus doesn't have an ebook device.
In speaking with neighbors and relatives about their bookbuying habits, the scenario repeats itself; that is, they have their preferences and rarely deviate from them.
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I'm a bit more diverse. There are both fiction and non-fiction I buy in hardcover, and I'll take most things as ebooks. The big exception will be things like coffee table art books - those don't translate well to electronic editions, due to small screen sizes and thinks like lack of color support in current generation readers.
I'm not normally concerned with the weight of hardcovers because I don't usually carry them around. In fact, I've been gradually replacing some paperbacks with hardcover editions for durable reading copies. If I'm traveling, hey, that's what ebooks are for...
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Dennis