With the cost of paper so high, some publishers are finding creative ways to provide content beyond the printed page, while adding value for the reader. Butler-Knight has had success with packaging other media, such as CD-ROMs, audio CDs and DVDs, with the “Idiot’s” guides.
“The more pages you have in a book, the higher your unit cost is going to be,” she notes. “As long as we’re careful to make sure that [additional] content has real value, that it’s not just a bunch of Word files stuck on a CD, but actually has a benefit to the reader … we are able to recoup the added cost of having the media put into the book and, at the same time, it allows us to keep page counts from growing and growing, because that’s the only thing you really can control.”