Macmillan Ebook Poll

[atidball]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

i've replied. i'm pretty curious to know what they have in mind ; a lot of the questions are about getting access to "several chapters" of a major book before it's official publication date, and whether i'd be willing to pay for that. i hope they don't think that selling book samples is a good / the only way to do ebooks...

That just made it sound like they are considering Webscriptions to me

[Moejoe]

17. What payment model would you prefer to gain early access to several chapters of these books?

Pay-Per-Title (access to one specific title’s sample chapters offered on the site)
Annual Subscription (access to all sample chapters of major release titles offered on the site)

That right there worries the crap out of me. Pay for samples? Pay an annual subscription to read samples (and then only the major releases). That's not a business model, that's some form of insanity

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

17. What payment model would you prefer to gain early access to several chapters of these books?

Pay-Per-Title (access to one specific title’s sample chapters offered on the site)
Annual Subscription (access to all sample chapters of major release titles offered on the site)

That right there worries the crap out of me. Pay for samples? Pay an annual subscription to read samples (and then only the major releases). That's not a business model, that's some form of insanity

I didn't respond to that one. I just moved on.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

I didn't respond to that one. I just moved on.

damned. i didn't think of trying to skip a question. too late now.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

I didn't respond to that one. I just moved on.

I don't think I got that question when I answered. Because earlier I answered no to Q12 2. Would you be willing to pay for this early access?

I'm still puzzled why anybody would think you could sell samples of books as the questions implies.

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

17. What payment model would you prefer to gain early access to several chapters of these books?

Pay-Per-Title (access to one specific title’s sample chapters offered on the site)
Annual Subscription (access to all sample chapters of major release titles offered on the site)

That right there worries the crap out of me. Pay for samples? Pay an annual subscription to read samples (and then only the major releases). That's not a business model, that's some form of insanity

It sounds to me like someone at Macmillan has read some of the recently published articles on the ebook market and is trying to figure out how to squeeze the maximum cash out of this new market. Pre-planned greed!

[Abecedary]

Keep in mind that this survey will present different questions depending on your answers to previous ones. When I took it, there were only a total of 10 or 11 questions.

[junkyardwillie]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

i've replied. i'm pretty curious to know what they have in mind ; a lot of the questions are about getting access to "several chapters" of a major book before it's official publication date, and whether i'd be willing to pay for that. i hope they don't think that selling book samples is a good / the only way to do ebooks...

The reason they are asking about that is probably because of the way the Kindle lets you download chapters of books to preview. I think thats a pretty poor service and I wouldn't pay for that. What I would be willing to pay for is some sort of subscription based book service that is like an "ebook library" or ebook version of Netflix, I can download a certain number of books at a time and return them (you don't really ever own ebooks anyway since there is no resale value). But its got to have real content not some no name authors I've never heard of, I mean like NY times best sellers and all.

The only company that I've seen get this right so far is Marvel Comics on their website, I think its like $50/per year and you get access to all of their comic books online and you can read whatever you want. I have a membership there and I think its great. With the amount of content you can read the subscription is almost a no brainer

Owning content is the way of the past. I dont want to own dvds, let someone else keep them somewhere and I can get them when I want it like Netflix. Keeping tons of books is a waste of space for me and I'm in an apartment so I don't have much space to waste. The big issue is trying to get the publishers on board, I'm not exactly sure how Netflix's business model works in terms of payments to the studios but there has to be a way to get that same business model into ebooks. I'm sure it costs 800x more to make a movie than it does to make a book so if the model can work with movies theres no excuse for books not being able to make the cut. When that comes and you can get multiple publishers titles in one database for one annual subscription price then we're talking turkey. If the publishers had half a brain in their head they would steal the marvel model and start up a subscription service that gives you access to all of their books that are in ebook format, but then again that would be thinking outside the box and they still think that people enjoy the "feel" of books too much to ever use ereaders.

[Daithi]

If you answer Indifferent to question 11 (the one about buying chapters) you get a lot fewer questions (it skips to question 24), so I think that's their main focus with this survey.

Also, I wasn't sure how to answer question 3., "Do you ever read books on a computer?"

Are they talking about a computer or an ereader here? I assumed they were talking about a computer and answered No, although that's not entirely true.

[daffy4u]

Nevermind, I get it now.

[Abecedary]

Originally Posted by Daithi

Also, I wasn't sure how to answer question 3., "Do you ever read books on a computer?"

Are they talking about a computer or an ereader here? I assumed they were talking about a computer and answered No, although that's not entirely true.

I think they're asking about actually reading on a computer (though they don't distinguish between laptop and desktop). I say this because one of the next questions asks specifically about using a "mobile reading device".

[DixieGal]

Done. I think the question that bothered me the most was how far down the list of age ranges I had to go before clicking.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by junkyardwillie

The reason they are asking about that is probably because of the way the Kindle lets you download chapters of books to preview. I think thats a pretty poor service and I wouldn't pay for that. What I would be willing to pay for is some sort of subscription based book service that is like an "ebook library" or ebook version of Netflix, I can download a certain number of books at a time and return them (you don't really ever own ebooks anyway since there is no resale value). But its got to have real content not some no name authors I've never heard of, I mean like NY times best sellers and all.

The only company that I've seen get this right so far is Marvel Comics on their website, I think its like $50/per year and you get access to all of their comic books online and you can read whatever you want. I have a membership there and I think its great. With the amount of content you can read the subscription is almost a no brainer

Owning content is the way of the past. I dont want to own dvds, let someone else keep them somewhere and I can get them when I want it like Netflix. Keeping tons of books is a waste of space for me and I'm in an apartment so I don't have much space to waste. The big issue is trying to get the publishers on board, I'm not exactly sure how Netflix's business model works in terms of payments to the studios but there has to be a way to get that same business model into ebooks. I'm sure it costs 800x more to make a movie than it does to make a book so if the model can work with movies theres no excuse for books not being able to make the cut. When that comes and you can get multiple publishers titles in one database for one annual subscription price then we're talking turkey. If the publishers had half a brain in their head they would steal the marvel model and start up a subscription service that gives you access to all of their books that are in ebook format, but then again that would be thinking outside the box and they still think that people enjoy the "feel" of books too much to ever use ereaders.

You make a very good point there about 'not owning' the physical object. A lot of the big pundits on the future of publishing are predicting a fully subscription, cloud based delivery service will be the only sustainable model in the future. The big problem with this is: who do you subscribe to? If every publisher has a model like Marvel $50/year which one do you choose? Will you have to choose the full model to get access to a single title (the publishers would love this one by the way)? Marvel is pretty distinct in its fanbase and has a lot of brand loyalty, but which publishing company can say it has the same? Baen? Well, Baen would be the only one out there, and maybe the big Romance one, Harlequin is it?

All things said and done, if you're charging for samples, you really should GTFO

[Elfwreck]

I didn't see questions 12-19 at all; I assume that if you checked "not interested" in sample chapters, they skipped those.

I have zero interest in partial books if the whole version isn't available. If I decide I want to read the book, I want to read it now.

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

You make a very good point there about 'not owning' the physical object. A lot of the big pundits on the future of publishing are predicting a fully subscription, cloud based delivery service will be the only sustainable model in the future. The big problem with this is: who do you subscribe to? If every publisher has a model like Marvel $50/year which one do you choose? Will you have to choose the full model to get access to a single title (the publishers would love this one by the way)? Marvel is pretty distinct in its fanbase and has a lot of brand loyalty, but which publishing company can say it has the same? Baen? Well, Baen would be the only one out there, and maybe the big Romance one, Harlequin is it?

All things said and done, if you're charging for samples, you really should GTFO

This brought into mind the problem Amazon customers are having getting updated copies of books originally published with formatting flaws (LOTR for example). Amazon states they back up all your purchased books on their servers. I always assumed they would simply have a file of links to book titles per customer, perhaps with customer notes, etc. linked to the PID of their Kindle. Apparently Amazon stores the entire book per customer - since customers that deleted the faulty copy and redownloaded the title still got the same flawed copy. So in this context, you really do "own" the book - or at least are irretrievably linked to one version of it linked to your account.