Quote:
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
