You'll find that, often, if not always, if you buy directly from a publisher, the ebook will be free with the paperback purchase. (Manning is one example, not sure about others off hand.) However, if someone is buying your book from Amazon, the paperback is one SKU and the ebook is another, and there's no easy to way to include the book away for free. So I think that's basically your answer.
For some context, after publishing my first book with O'Reilly, I decided to start a small publishing business in an effort to capture more revenue as well as experiment with continuous publishing (you buy one edition, I keep it up to date for a couple of years). I've written three books, with the last (Bulletproof TLS and PKI) being the best and the only one still relevant.
When we first started, we offered paperback and ebook options, with ebook free with paperback purchase. We had 3 virtual warehouses in the US, UK, and Europe. It was fun for a while, but we lost money on every paperback sale as we couldn't compete with Amazon on shipping costs (plus additional overhead of dealing with shipping problems). You have to pay your printer, shipping costs to the warehouses, order fulfilment, and shipping costs. Then insurance when something goes wrong, even if it's not our fault.
At some point we stopped selling paperback books, but we continued to offer free ebooks with a proof of purchase. This, too, ended up being a money-losing venture, because we make little money on each book, with most of the money going to the printer (print on demand is great, but expensive, and Amazon takes 40% of the list price.)
Today, we sell ebooks on our web site, and paperbacks via Amazon. We're nice people so we may give you a free ebook if you ask, but that's not a good way to run a business. It's fortunate, then, that we're not in it for the money.
To sum up it up: Amazon is the dominant sales channel. If they offered paperback and ebook distribution (Kindle, pub, and PDF—mandatory if you care about the user experience), we'd happily sell only through them and give everyone a free ebook with paperback purchase. We'd give Amazon the standard 40% (the minimum for paperbacks, not sure that it is for ebooks these days).
> You'll find that, often, if not always, if you buy directly from a publisher, the ebook will be free with the paperback purchase. (Manning is one example, not sure about others off hand.)
Extrapolating “often, if not always” from one niche publisher is quite a stretch.
You're right. I answered in the context of technical books, where you do tend to get a free ebook if you buy the paperback directly from the publisher. Since that response, I checked a few of the other publishers and it's correct.
But, re-reading the top question now, I see that it's not specifically about technical literature.
For some context, after publishing my first book with O'Reilly, I decided to start a small publishing business in an effort to capture more revenue as well as experiment with continuous publishing (you buy one edition, I keep it up to date for a couple of years). I've written three books, with the last (Bulletproof TLS and PKI) being the best and the only one still relevant.
When we first started, we offered paperback and ebook options, with ebook free with paperback purchase. We had 3 virtual warehouses in the US, UK, and Europe. It was fun for a while, but we lost money on every paperback sale as we couldn't compete with Amazon on shipping costs (plus additional overhead of dealing with shipping problems). You have to pay your printer, shipping costs to the warehouses, order fulfilment, and shipping costs. Then insurance when something goes wrong, even if it's not our fault.
At some point we stopped selling paperback books, but we continued to offer free ebooks with a proof of purchase. This, too, ended up being a money-losing venture, because we make little money on each book, with most of the money going to the printer (print on demand is great, but expensive, and Amazon takes 40% of the list price.)
Today, we sell ebooks on our web site, and paperbacks via Amazon. We're nice people so we may give you a free ebook if you ask, but that's not a good way to run a business. It's fortunate, then, that we're not in it for the money.
To sum up it up: Amazon is the dominant sales channel. If they offered paperback and ebook distribution (Kindle, pub, and PDF—mandatory if you care about the user experience), we'd happily sell only through them and give everyone a free ebook with paperback purchase. We'd give Amazon the standard 40% (the minimum for paperbacks, not sure that it is for ebooks these days).