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Originally Posted by stumped
thing is, that's how all books work, e & p, pay once, use forever, so its sort of expected that book handler apps should be the same.
e reader apps are all either free, or pay once... Moon, Aldiko ... and Calibre itself, as we know, is 100% free and will almost certainly remain so
also, a simple librarian app should not need constant enhancements & updates, code it once, get it right, leave it be....
we are probably both repeating ourselves but i don't thing the subscription model is going to be viable either, and that its' only a matter of time before a "good enough" open source , freeware solution appears
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I'm not sure that it follows that since books work that way, apps should work the same way. We don't expect authors to constantly revise the book, then give us a free copy of the revised book.
In the development community, there are a lot of open source/freeware solutions. The problem is that a lot of it fairly quickly becomes abandonware after a couple of years. Perhaps not a problem if the underlying operating system doesn't ever change, but that's not really the case. For example, Marvin appears to be abandonware at this point. It hasn't had any updates in two years and the developer hasn't posted for even longer than that. Eventually, there will be an iOS update that breaks it, much like there was a MacOS update that broke the Marvin plugin long ago. That's just the nature of modern operating systems. I have one mac mini that I keep at Sierra just because there are a few programs that I use that stopped working when High Sierra came out.
I don't know that one can point to Calibre as an example. I've been using Calibre since it was libprs500, way back when Govid first wrote it, and I've sent a fair amount of money his way via paypal donations, but it's pretty unique, plus I seem to recall him having deals with some companies. You have to have a pretty big base of users for that sort of thing to work, at least from the stand point of working well enough to support the developer.