From: Mike Dent
To: ask_tim@oreilly.com
Subject: CD's with Books
Hello, whilst I have bought *many* of your excellent books over the years one slight annoying thing has bugged me. The books which contain CD's. Would it not be possible to do an edition of each book with and without the CD? Many people these days have access to much of the content of these CD's from the Net. I remember buying the "Unix Power Tools" book back in 1993 when it first came out. I was a avid Linux user/fan then and the CD which came with it was practically useless for me at that time as it contained no Linux files, in fact no mention of Linux in the book, but I still use it to this day. I paid extra for the book then I am sure, because of the included CD. I notice the Definitive Apache book is bundled with a CD, which seems to push the price of it up, I'd go out tomorrow and buy that book if it did not contain the CD. Anyways, just my comments, Keep up the excellent work!
Mike
Mike,
We've really struggled with this one. We actually tried what you suggest when we first started shipping books with CDs.
The first book we tried this with was The X Window System Administrator's Guide, which came in CD and non-CD editions. The problem that we ended up with was that because of different sales rates of the two editions, it became extremely difficult to keep the inventory in balance. So you'd go back to print on one when there were still plenty of copies of the other. This drove our costs up, and also drove our retailers crazy, as it was hard to keep both editions in stock.
So we tried something else.
We felt that other publishers were using CDs just to inflate the cost of their books. We came up with this idea of shipping separate CD-only supplements to books that needed CDs. Someone who wanted both would buy the book and the supplement; anyone else could just buy the book.
As it turned out, customers complained that they had to buy two items (even when the combined price was no more than that for competing book/cd combinations), and there were problems when retailers would carry only one half of the combination and not the other.
So we ended up putting in the CDs just like everyone else. But we try to value the CD based on its contents, and generally don't raise the price more than a few dollars for the CD unless there's real added value there. If you compare our book/cd combinations with those of our competitors, you'll find they are generally considerably cheaper, or if they are of a comparable price, it's because there's a lot more work in the CD than just a collection of shovelware or the examples from the book.
For example, even though you might not have been able to use the UNIX Power Tools binaries, it might be of interest to know that we spent a lot of money to develop the binaries that we did put on there. There was a lot of testing and integration on that disk.
--Tim
