Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
I might add that exactly the same objections were made to the idea of rental and subscription models for movies, and contracts had to be written or rewritten there too.
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Movies have had, for many years, a provision for royalties for broadcast; adapting that to paid-subscription broadcast instead of open-public broadcast is a lot simpler than creating a provision for broadcast from scratch.
Especially given the
bad accounting and
rights grabs and
bizarre royalty change demands that publishers are often prone to; authors have little incentive to just agree to whatever terms publishers suggest for subscriptions.
It's not an impossible situation--
everyone would like ebook subscriptions to be available, and that's a strong motivator to find terms that authors, publishers, distributors and readers all agree to--but it's an entirely *new* economic and technological model in an industry that's known for "this is how it's always been done" contracts and digging in its heels to avoid new technology for as long as it possibly can.
The hard limits:
Readers will pay maybe $10-15/month for content. Whether that's a limited pool ("up to three books per month for $10/month") or an unlimited all-you-can-read from the basic catalog, or some kind of crossover, doesn't matter. The sweet spot for subscribe-to-entertainment is between $5 and $20 a month, and for $20 they'd have to provide a side of dancing boys and chats with pornstars. Which some MMORPGs can offer; ebook publishers can't.
The service provider--Amazon, in this hypothetical case--is going to insist on a percentage, quite likely a substantial one like 25% of every subscription. More, if they think the software is going to take real time to create & maintain. Author fees & publisher profits have to come out of what's left.
Someone has to pay for customer service, because (1) all software has the occasional glitch or bug and (2) some customers are idiots, and it doesn't matter whether the customer utterly failed to follow basic instructions; bad PR from idiot customers is just as damaging to future sales as bad PR from customers who were paying attention. So customer service will have to accept a certain level of "oops, I didn't mean to click that button; uncharge me for that" and "whaddaya mean, it now only works on my cousin's iPhone? No! I was just showing her how it worked, not signing her up! Fix it!" They'll also need to deal with actual tech problems--server hiccups causing lost books/deleted registrations, outages resulting in irate customers (who will not care if the contract terms allow that; they won't *renew* if they're not getting what they want to pay for), and of course, poorly-formatted books.
Authors are going to want to being paid for every reader who reads their books, not an amorphous percentage-of-subscriptions. (Whether they can insist on this is a separate issue; they'll at least make noise about it.) Some authors will refuse to go along with the game, and if they're influential enough, the whole thing could be scuttled.
Publishers are going to scream about the importance of DRM. Most readers won't care--but those who can't read the way they want to, won't subscribe. While the number of cloud-based devices is going up, I don't think it's high enough yet to support a business model that's going to have a high number of technical & legal setup problems. (Notice how Apple is *not* releasing any iBookstore sales numbers?)
I like the idea of ebook subscriptions; I don't see a way to make it work like Netflix or Pandora.