This is a major pain point for me, and this solves half of it.
Every time I buy a book, I have to do a lot of thinking: Is is good enough I'll want to lend it? Will I need to travel with it? Is it worth getting rid of some other book on my bookshelf to make room for it? Am I going to refer to it? If so, will it be just the occasional text search, or do I need the random access of a physical book? There is often no good answer.
This actually results in me buying fewer books. A number of times I have waffled on this and then just never bought the book. It also increases resentment toward Amazon: when I buy a book and then have to re-buy it in the other format, it's really annoying.
In addition to this, I want them to add the other direction: if I buy the Kindle book, can I upgrade to a physical edition for the price difference (plus, optionally, a modest fee)?
I go through this a lot too. I've bought books in ebook format that I've regretted, because I can't lend them easily. Conversely I've bought physical books which I wish were ebooks, because I don't reference them that often, and they're really wasting space. Not being limited to one or the other format would be great!
Although what happens when you buy the physical book, get the ebook for cheap, then on-sell the physical book? Seems like an open loop.
Yeah. Although that's an open loop with CDs that has existed for years, so I imagine Amazon has some reasonable notions on the magnitude of the problem. I'd guess it's much less of an issue with books; CDs have a much higher repeat use value than most books do.
My guess is that some people will do it accidentally, but that the number of people doing it as a book cost-reduction strategy will be pretty low. The net yield on selling used books is not good. And I'd guess further that for 98% of on-sold physical books, people will never go back and look at the ebook again.
It depends on the type of book. For fiction this is definitely true. For textbooks and technical books, there is a massive used market with high resale prices, which is more what I was thinking of. I suspect a lot of these vendors simply won't jump on the bandwagon without some kind of reassurance.
Every time I buy a book, I have to do a lot of thinking: Is is good enough I'll want to lend it? Will I need to travel with it? Is it worth getting rid of some other book on my bookshelf to make room for it? Am I going to refer to it? If so, will it be just the occasional text search, or do I need the random access of a physical book? There is often no good answer.
This actually results in me buying fewer books. A number of times I have waffled on this and then just never bought the book. It also increases resentment toward Amazon: when I buy a book and then have to re-buy it in the other format, it's really annoying.
In addition to this, I want them to add the other direction: if I buy the Kindle book, can I upgrade to a physical edition for the price difference (plus, optionally, a modest fee)?