Ebook tie-in used by B&N and Algonquin; Random House to release presidential campaign ebooks

ShelfAwareness is reporting:

Algonquin Books and Barnes & Noble have teamed up to try an unusual type of bundling: customers at some 300 B&N stores who buy one of 12 designated trade paperback books can then buy one of 12 designated e-books for $3. In October, in a second more direct type of bundling, customers at B&N and at independent bookstores who buy the hardcover of When She Woke by Hillary Jordan receive a free e-book version of the title.

“We spend a lot of time lately trying to figure out how to sell books in this new world order,” Algonquin publisher Elisabeth Scharlatt told the New York Times. “And particularly to help booksellers to sell hardcover books, which seems increasingly difficult. So this seemed like one way of calling attention to a book by giving an incentive to the customer.”

Bob Miller, group publisher of Workman, which owns Algonquin–Miller is a longtime proponent of bundling–commented: “Consumers are starting to feel like, ‘If I’m buying the book, why do I have to buy it several times to have multiple formats?'”

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In another e-book experiment, Politico.com is teaming up with Random House to publish four e-books about the 2012 presidential campaign that will be written by Mike Allen, Politico’s chief White House correspondent, and Evan Thomas, the political reporter who has written for Newsweek and Time, the New York Times reported. Each book will be 20,000-30,000 words; the first appears “sometime before Christmas.”

Random House executive editor Jon Meacham called the unusual series–in the past detailed books about the campaign appeared after the election–a way to change readers’ perception of publishers. “An impetus here is to encourage people to think of book publishers in a more periodical way,” he told the Times, adding, “I think the marriage of Politico’s reporting and Random House’s narrative strengths is a great one.”