Just received Steves book...via PDF

[abcZen]

Hi, I was one of the people who are interested in getting a copy of steves book to review.

My address was included so I assumed that these were going to be mailed out. I've just received a PDF version (150 pages) which I assume is what we are going to read?

Can this be confirmed / denied. Just wondering why address' were sent off and why they chose to send out a PDF version, I'm not a big fan of reading that much on a screen.

[Wanderer]

Could be for quotes and so on on the website. Although if it's been done by the publishers they could be trying to save money, ask the people that sent you the book. Probably the fastest way to find out.

[Erin Pavlina]

Hay House was resistant to the idea of sending any books to people outside the United States. Steve explained how important they were, so they compromised and sent ebook versions to people outside the U.S. People in the U.S. will get the hard copy.

[BlueCrane]

Thanks Erin - same thing happened to me in Austria.

[geofones]

Same here in the UK - I complained after doing my review (Geoff Jones » Steve Pavlina on Truth, Love & Power) and they have now promised to send a hard copy from the UK publishing arm at some point in the future

[Savage]

If you live in the USA, Hay House will ship you a copy of the book from their headquarters in California. Everyone in the USA should receive a print copy via mail.


If you live outside the USA, the situation is a bit different. Due to the higher cost of shipping books outside the USA, the unreliability of the postal systems in certain countries, and requests from many international bloggers to receive the book sooner rather than later, we decided to qualify international review requests into two levels. First, if your website meets a certain traffic baseline level (which we had to set pretty high), you'll receive a print copy of the book via postal mail. However, if you didn't meet that baseline, Hay House will still send you a PDF version of the book via email. The content is the same as the print book. The alternative would have been to disqualify most international review requests, so I think it's a fair compromise to send an electronic version of the book instead of none at all. We want to be as fair as possible to international reviewers while still making this work on a practical level.

There were a lot of international review requests from places/languages where the book won't even be sold (at least initially). Hay House wanted to disqualify most of those requests because the initial launch is focused on the U.S. market. I wanted everyone to get the book though, especially since you can't really geo-target the blogosphere. So we compromised by letting everyone at least get an ebook.

One of the issues in dealing with so many requests in such a short period of time is that Hay House had to batch process them as "domestic" or "international" and couldn't really customize this by country.

[supertom]

Originally Posted by geofones

Same here in the UK - I complained after doing my review (Geoff Jones » Steve Pavlina on Truth, Love & Power) and they have now promised to send a hard copy from the UK publishing arm at some point in the future

who cares ebook is just as good.

I just i have to wait longer since its just focused on the US markets, been looking at the aus online stores and its not there yet.

[PresNevins]

[off topic] Now if only Hay House would actually sell me that PDF, in addition to the paper copy I ordered that'll eventually arrive here in Japan... (Er, sorry, bleed-over from the sample chapter thread...) [/off topic]

Pres

[backpocket]

Since there's already a PDF version that's given away, why not just make it available for purchase already I'm sure there are many of us here from outside the US who are more than happy to get the pdf version.

[Bruce Achterberg]

I'll probably buy an ebook copy. Nice formatting would be welcome. It'd be super neat if you got a copy of it when you bought the print book, but that might not be feasible cost-wise.

I'm all for not scamming people in terms of cost (i.e. so I'm happy to pay for an ebook even if I have a print copy; it's just a distribution thing). Pitty most companies don't share my approach.

(Not that Pavlina LLC or Hay House scam people; that was just a general non-targeted statement.)

[supertom]

I dont think hayhouse realise how big steve books sales could be, if hes got 2 mil readers a month than they'll at least look at his book, and they'll proberly end up buying it.

[PresNevins]

It'd be a matter of figuring out a way they can sell an ebook without cannibalizing sales of the paper book (the hardcover now, and then the paperback when it's released...next year, was it?). As a publisher they're all set up to produce and make money off of their paper books, but nobody really knows what to do with ebooks.

Make them open, knowing that they'll be copied across the internet? Stuff them with DRM so they can't be copied, but so that nobody wants to buy them either? Tie them to a transient piece of hardware so only people with lots of spare cash (or only within a single country, like the Kindle) can even buy them? My opinion is always on the "open=good" end of the scale, but for a business it's a tough decision.

As far as price goes, publishers generally say "this book is worth $x" so they set the prices of both the ebook and paper book somewhere around there, and you get the weird situation that the ebook version with no printing or storage or shipping costs, costs more than the Amazon-discounted paper version. This feels rather kittywompus to the consumer, so ebook sales aren't so huge. Like Bruce touched on in the other thread, consumers tend to think they're buying the medium (a "lighter" medium theoretically implying lower costs) while publishers focus on the content that they're selling (so the price should be more or less the same).

I appreciate that Hay House is making Steve's book available in PDF for the international blogger people -- it implies they're not completely clueless, as international shipping is a non-trivial cost. I just wish I had a qualifying blog!

[backpocket]

Originally Posted by PresNevins

This feels rather kittywompus...

For some reason, I'm hoping to find the word kittywompus in PDSP when I get it later (whenever it reaches M'sia, anyway)