I am really disappointed to know that Sitepoint wants us to buy the same digital books 3 times (one for each format) and I wish you would reconsider this decision. I have bought eighteen of your books in PDF format and other publishers (Manning, O’Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers) allow me to download any version I want when I buy a Digital Edition from them.
After all, I’m buying the content and not the format it is distributed in unless it is printed where I have to pay for the paper as well.
I have an iPhone and a Kindle so I don’t believe that I will be willing to pay 3 times for the same book. Considering that I’d have to rebuy 36 books (.mobi and .epub for each of the eighteen books I already own), I probably won’t buy any books from you from now.
Sorry about the confusion – EPUB & Kindle are bundled together as a package and right now you can get both formats for only $6 per book if you’d like those formats.
I have hundreds of physical books on my shelf - unfortunately, Amazon and other publishers didn’t give me the digital formats free of charge when they were released.
I knew what I was buying when I made the original purchase and I was happy with my decision at the time. If a company gave me free stuff months or years after my purchase it because of a new format that would be an unexpected bonus - but I would never expect or demand it retroactively.
It’s pay for convenience. If I buy a hardcover, I still have to pay extra if I decide that I want the convenience of the audiobook format a few days/weeks or months later. If you bought the PDF and now want the convenience of having the book accessible on your iPhone a few months after your initial purchase, then there’s an small extra cost for that as well.
As I said in my post, I was not talking about digital x physical x audio formats, but digital formats only. When other publishers started to provide ebooks in other formats, they provided me those files free of charge. If you think that you should charge extra for those files, so be it. I’ll have to pay $108,00 extra just for that.
You just lost a good customer. If you check my orders, I bought almost every book in your catalog (digital and physical), but I won’t buy books from you again. I’ll keep buying books from publishers that don’t charge extra for other DIGITAL formats.
I can understand not doing it for physical books because their a different medium (and not intended for digital distribution), however I am rather surprised that owners of digital books (PDF’s) won’t get the digital equivalents for portable devices. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why you’re doing it but offering the EPUB & Kindle versions separately (as a purchase) from the PDF does feel almost like the end user would be punished for wanting to use the digital media to work on the devices they want to use. The whole point of digital publications of media is that they can enjoy and use the purchased content on whichever “machine” they feel most comfortable using, having to pay an additional fee to take your content on the move is much alike DRM in MP3 files, it says you’re free to use the media only on devices we choose to support at this time, and if you want to lose the restriction of where you can use what you purchased, you’ll need to pay us extra for a more flexible option. Don’t take this as a bash at you guys Matt, I know it probably took work to convert the books into something readable on those devices, but it does feel like you may well alienate the e-reader market, especially if the end user is required to purchase two versions of each title (one for their portable devices and one for their computer).
I agree. People who bought the digital formats should have access to all digital formats. It sucks that I did the 5 for 1 deal last time and only have access to the pdf versions and not the epub or kindle versions. I would like to return all of my pdf versions in exchange for all three formats. You are really putting a bad taste into the mouth of your core customers sitepoint. Like I said before do not be greedy and do the right thing.
So this is the end of my story with Sitepoint. I used the promotion and bought AGAIN copies of books I already own in PDF format (and 2 that I didn’t own, just to be fair) that are available in .epub and .mobi format. It cost me $89,85. Some of the books I own are still in PDF format only, but I’m not SO stupid to buy them again. Maybe when they are released in .mobi and .epub and there is another of these sales I’ll buy them.
But one thing is true. I will never buy another book Sitepoint releases anymore. I do not approve their greedy behavior and I’ll show it with my wallet. For a company that sells books about marketing amongst others, they don’t seem to have learned the lesson that is more expensive to get a new customer than it is to keep an old one. So if they believe that alienating their faithful customers is the way to go, I hope they are proud of what they are doing.
I am tipically a “silent customer”. I usually don’t complain when I feel that a company disappointed me. I simply go away without ever looking back, but I really like Sitepoint books and when I found out that they were charging extra for different formats of books I already owned, I tried to reason with them first.
So, yeah, I’m glad to know that Sitepoint reconsidered their decision. Now I can keep buying books from them.
