Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Thornton
They need to allow 5 minutes to copy the results into the ledger - they might need to cut a new nib on their quill, you know!
Fair enough, but even then you'd need to be confident that their catalogue covered those. I just can't see this being attractive to people who buy a book a month, just like I doubt that lovefilm is attractive to people who rent one film a month.
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Not only that but you'd need to ensure you buy/read one book every month. Miss a month or so and your subscription works out more expensive than buying, and that's not including borrowing off of friends / family too.
I'd sign up for between £5-£10 per month if it was an unlimited number of books (or an incredibly high limit) that you can read. I'd even commit to a 6 month subscription (or longer if there's a decent discount).
Based on my current reading habits, I read around 2 books a month. But occasionally I'll read several books a week/month and for that reason would sign up to a subscription service that is all you can read.
Whether you get to keep the books or not is a minor point to me, so long as the price is cheap enough for the subscription. If they want to offer a slightly higher price but you get to keep 1, 3, 5 books per month then I'd also consider that.
The music industry are trying this model as a complement to the existing sales model with services like Spotify and SkySongs to name but two. I see no reason this cannot be made to work with eBooks (and film/tv too).
One thing I'd like to see though is the ability to have a couple of users/readers per account on a family plan. Cost could be increased slightly but should be less than say 4 separate accounts. That way parents can sign up and allow their children to have access to a number of books too.
The biggest hurdle for the service will be price point though. If it's too high people will weigh up how much they spend a month on books and decide it's cheaper to buy/borrow. If it's too cheap they won't get the publishers onboard. Hopefully they'll hit the sweet spot though and make additional money by perhaps having a tiered service level. For example £5 p/m gets you unlimited rentals only. £10-20 gets you unlimited rentals + keep X books per month. £30+ gives you access to exclusives early, get pre-release copies and anything else they can think of beyond just renting the books to get some people onto a premium service. £30 could be even more depending on the advantages.
A tiered model would make more sense to me as the different options are likely to appeal to different readers and in turn maximise the subscription income you can get from each group.
One thing for them to bear in mind on price though, it costs 69p to buy most music tracks now, yet for £9.99 you get to listen to an unlimited number per day. It costs £20-£50 to sign up movie/tv services and you get to watch 24*32 hours worth of content if you didn't sleep
Yet for books, most people may only read a couple per month, sure some will read 1-2 per day, but you can't price based on those people no more than music/movie services can price based on someone listening to 100's of tracks per day.
I doubt the service will work with my reader though, at least not without ripping the DRM. Hopefully they'll use a common DRM + epub to maximise the number of people who can take advantage of this kind of service on their readers.