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Comment by mos2 | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a pretty interesting article about doing a revised product, 2nd product launch. From what I gather, it is quite similar to a 2nd or subsequent edition of a non-fiction book. I can't remember where I read it, but someone said that you can often make more money off of a 2nd edition, and often it takes a lot less work than the 1st edition as you are just revising the content.

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I was reading about this yesterday. Seems the publishing industry will release a hardcover, softcover, and then a small softcover version of the book. Not sure the exact benefits, but they wouldn't do it unless it made money.

I think it's price discrimination. As I understand it hardcover books have much higher profit margins. The major fans want to buy a book ASAP and if hardcover is the only option they'll buy that. But if all editions are available from day 1 then a lot of customers will buy the cheapest one.

I think you're right. I found the article I was thinking of:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/magazine/24patterson-t.htm...

Here's the section:

"WHAT IS PERHAPS most remarkable about the Patterson empire is the sheer volume of books it produces. The nine hardcovers a year are really only the beginning. Nearly all of those books are published a second and third time, first as traditional paperbacks, then as pocket-size, mass-market paperbacks. “Scarcely a week goes by when we aren’t publishing something by James Patterson,” Young told me, only half-joking."

That is 100% the case, same way movies prefer to have it in theaters and then release onto Blu-ray/dvd later to get people in theaters THEN get them to buy it. Controlling buying habits through windowing is annoying but not surprising method of improving revenue among other things.

Another fiction example, to ensure the last book of the Wheel of Time would hit #1 on the NYT hardcover list the original author's widow talked the publisher into not releasing the eBook right away to make sure people who bought the book week 1 got the hardback ensuring it would hit the top spot.

My game developer friends mentioned something similar–that expansion packs were much more profitable than building new games. Because the expansion could take ~10% of the time but would generate 50% of the sales of the original.

This was in the 90s but similar principles are probably true in a lot of fields.

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