Michael Jensen | 03/22/2010

The publishers who are able to sell directly to customers—which is a small proportion—are also able to sell “bundles”: get the digital ebook (E) and  the print (P). For many of those publishers, the bundles sell better than either E or P.

Part of it is the ease of add-on: “For an extra 10%, you can have the digital form, too.” Another part is the pleasurable immediacy of getting the digital instantly, while knowing that the “real” print version is coming.

So far, I know of no instance of someone cancelling a print order after placing an order for a bundle and receiving a digital file. The publishers who sell bundles—O’Reilly, my own National Academies Press, and others—soon discover that the bundle is often the preferred mode, sometimes outselling either option even combined.

Selling a “bundle” presupposes, of course, that a Canadian publisher could sell directly to a US customer from their own website—something that few currently do.  That market niche is worth exploring in other venues, however, by expressing your desire for bundle sales from any distributor who enables individual sales.

As I’ve said elsewhere, finding ways to “upsell”—even upselling something that just adds a wee premium to an existing premium product—is a big part of finding ways to stay solvent in the new information-abundant society.

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