Early last week, a few tweets appeared in my Twitter stream regarding a new book called Tapworthy – Designing Great iPhone Apps. An O’Reilly book written by Josh Clark (@globalmoxie).
The book is on sale for $40 in print form, or $32 in PDF / electronic format. Which isn’t a bad price for a reference book relating to iPhone design. The Apple App Store has seen incredible success thanks to the iPhone, iPod & iPad and i’m sure there are loads of designers / developers out there who see the App Store as lucrative. For that point alone, a well written book like this is most definitely worth the money.
The reason I’m writing this though is that there was a discount code roaming around the internets that reduces the electronic format cost from $32 to $10. Thats a pretty substantial reduction.
Which got me thinking. I doubt I would have purchased the book if it was $32 as iPhone design isn’t my forte (but an avenue i’d like to pursue), but at $10 it’s certainly worth having. I’m sure i’m not the only person who thinks like this.
Could a substantial discount code (like this example) actually sell more copies & make more money for those involved than if the discount wasn’t available?
I’d be interested to find out the stats on the sale of the book, but lets do some quick sums.
O’Reilly would need to sell 3.2 copies at the discounted rate to achieve the cost they originally had if they sold 1 copy without the discount. I’d hazard a guess that the discount probably got 2 or 3 times more people to purchase the book; possibly even more. Then on top of that, you’ve got future sales of books written by Josh Clark based on the quality of Tapworthy. And of course, some people may purchase the e-book and enjoy it so much, they’d buy the print copy for reference (I much prefer hard copies of books to e-books anyway)!
I’m pretty sure – in a round-about way – that O’Reilly have sold more copies & made more money using the discount code route.
To end this little post, I think what O’Reilly have done with this ebook discount has got them more sales than they would have originally, it would have also given the book & author more exposure and introduced more people to the world of designing for the iPhone.
I wish more authors & publishers would do the same. I truly believe a lower price point for e-books would bring more sales & ultimately, more money to the authors over a long time period.
What do you think?
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