Zondervan electronic vs. print prices?

I'm interested in the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds commentary- The OT set in paper retails for $250, but you can get it for almost $100 less from Amazon. Even bigger discount with the NT Set- 70% off at one store, $50!

But both sets go through Logos for full price, $250 and $169. There's not even a prepub $10 discount or anything. IT's odd, since printing it costs money (especially for nice big glossy pages), but electronic downloads don't. (Just production costs.)

Is this typical for Zondervan products? I never used Pradis.

Is there a chance they'll go down in the future?

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Rich DeRuiter

I'm interested in the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds commentary- The OT set in paper retails for $250, but you can get it for almost $100 less from Amazon. Even bigger discount with the NT Set- 70% off at one store, $50!

But both sets go through Logos for full price, $250 and $169. There's not even a prepub $10 discount or anything. IT's odd, since printing it costs money (especially for nice big glossy pages), but electronic downloads don't. (Just production costs.)

Is this typical for Zondervan products? I never used Pradis.

Is there a chance they'll go down in the future?

The publisher sets the price (not Logos). Maybe you knew that.

Logos has only released a few titles from Zondervan over the years and I haven't noticed whether prices here always reflect the MSRP for the print editions or not. I would not be surprised that this the SOP for Zondervan, and may be mandated by its parent company.

Yes printing costs, money and once a resource is developed it does not have to be developed again. Or does it? All of our Logos3 resources are being recompiled and often retagged for use in Logos4. Also, unlike print editions, electronic editions are can be updated with typo fixes, the like. Logos' commitment to us is that we never have to buy the same book twice, but that means that we get not only the book we first buy, but also all the revisions and reformatting for the books forever (well as long as we and Logos both shall live).

But I don't think about electronic vs. 'dead-tree' versions anymore. Any reference work available in Logos is more valuable to me than the same work in any print edition, because in Logos they are so much more useful, and so much more convenient. And while I'd love to see the cost of production go down, I don't want to see the value of the product go down. I realize that when I buy a book I'm getting not just a resource, but an unsurpassed system to make the best use of it. In the end, I look at the value of the resource to me in the Logos platform and make my decision based solely on that. The other information is irrelevant to me.

To answer your last question, who knows? Obviously if the pre-pub and the full price are the same, there's no incentive to buy it now. If you don't need/want it for that price, wait until it hits a price that you do. It may never get lower, but it could (probably not before a couple of years down the road, I'd guess).

Alain Maashe

Ben,

Zondervan products have been generally less expensive in electronic format and were good bargains (Pradis)

The lack of substantial discount even on pre-pub is rather surprising for the Logos edition

They might be confusion the eagerness to have Zondervan in Logos format with a willingness to pay whatever price they want to charge.

It is really unusual not to allow substantial discounts or any discount at all on the list price especially when you have the print edition discounted by as much as 40% on websites such as Amazon and Buy.com (not to mention the added cost of paper)

Even old resources that are being supplanted by new edition (i.e. the Expositor Bible Commentary which has 80% of the revised volumes out) are still overpriced

Maybe they want the first customers to pay for the cost of development involved in the transition to Logos but I will not be one of them at that price not to mention the issues with my existing Pradis products.

Alain

Mike S.

If you're looking for cheap and electronic, look to pure reader formats, not research tools like Logos (or others like it) that help tie a single book into a collection for research across a huge variety of books that allow for copy and paste (not exactly a feature of the kindle or any other reader!)

The prices I have seen are generally the going price in other tools like Logos, but they do sometimes have sales on an infrequent basis for as much as 20-30% off.

If I want purely to read something, I buy the print copy because I can take marginal notes easily and take it anywhere with me. Kindle and other readers still don't have the marginal note taking capabilities (nor does Logos IMHO) nor the convenience of instant "startup" and "shutdown"

At the same time, it is really hard for me to have 4 different commentaries and two or more bible dictionaries, and 4 bible versions open at the same time when doing in depth study.... this is where I see research tools like Logos come in handy. In these cases I still have one or two of my printed commentaries open with my marginal notes (I use NICOT in print form as an example).

Another important thing to remember: publishing books in print form is a finely tuned assembly line where the author(s) do 80% of the work, and tooling does 19% and people at publishers do about 1% (of the publishing work... most of the their time is spent in acquisitions and marketing). Adding an electronic version goes to about 1/10,000 the number of customers, and the work of the author must be normalized for the target too, links put into place... so the author in this case does maybe 50% of the work (I have no idea... guessing here) and then it takes a TEAM of people to essentially rewrite the book for research tools like Logos.... so while you're thinking the cost of the MATERIALS is less... the cost of PUBLISHING for Logos is much higher and has a much lower return. Now, if everyone had Logos that would buy a book, things would be different... the authors would start with a set of standards about how to refer to verses, how to link to other resources, etc., and the tooling would be the same as it is in the print business. Kindle gets away with doing less and costing less because they simply remove that publishing cost, add tooling, and they loose the ability to have research tool capability. By the way, this is why kindle will continue to kill other ebook readers: kindle doesn't require the publisher to do the work, they take it from the publisher and do the work for them through tooling. Barnes and Noble requires the publisher to do the work and will therefore always have a smaller library.