Waterstones subscribe-to-rent or subscribe-to-keep service

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by banjomike

Waterstones in the UK are running a survey on book and ebook purchasing.

I found it interesting to fill in. But their target audience must be very different to me. I mean "In the last 12 months roughly how many books have you bought for yourself (including eBooks and audiobooks)?" with a maximum answer in the pop-up being 13+!

I didn't realise it was a pop-up, and so I looked it up in by email archives. Umm... 300+?

I think I could be interested in a subscription to 'so many books per month or per year'. But it would have to be at a significant discount to the retail price if I'm going to commit a definite amount of money to them for a year or more.

After all, but waiting at fictionwise for discounts, by average ebook price is under $3.50. So I'd want to see the per-book cost of the subscription package at Waterstones be about that much. So perhaps £2.50 per book. (including VAT). I think that's about what I put in the survey.

Of course, rental is worth much less. I reckoned around £1 per rental was reasonable, and that £0.50 would be a bargain.

[banjomike]

Originally Posted by sony_fox

Maybe not. But I'd rather see a link to an official Waterstones site before I go there, or believe it has anything to do with them.

I take your point, but the link I posted came FROM the Waterstones site after I was redirected from the Waterstones.com site TO the voodoores site. It was part of the Waterstones newsletter-thing using my Waterstones club card number and full name. Seems reasonably OK. Not guaranteed of course.

[Ben Thornton]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I found it interesting to fill in. But their target audience must be very different to me. I mean "In the last 12 months roughly how many books have you bought for yourself (including eBooks and audiobooks)?" with a maximum answer in the pop-up being 13+!

I found that odd, too. They put the maximum per year at 50 in one of their schemes, but acknowledged that you might want 80 in a later question, yet didn't collect data beyond 13+ for existing purchases. Why would people sign up to a subscription service if they only bought 1 book a month in any case?

I think that something along these lines could work, though. Lovefilm.com and similar offerings let you watch a similar number of DVDs for a monthly subscription, and the film industry allows those.

[Mike L]

It's obvious a professionally-designed survey - not the usual jumble of question you often see. But I agree it should include some sort of credentials, such as the survey organisation's name and address.

Also, the message on the last page is a bit curious:

Due to the high volume of responses, please leave this page open for 5 minutes to ensure our systems have time to save all your responses accurately.

Seems like an odd way to implement a question-response system.

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by Ben Thornton

Why would people sign up to a subscription service if they only bought 1 book a month in any case?

Presumably if it were cheaper than buying 12 books a la carte over the course of a year.

[Ben Thornton]

Originally Posted by Mike L

Also, the message on the last page is a bit curious:

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!

Originally Posted by Pardoz

Presumably if it were cheaper than buying 12 books a la carte over the course of a year.

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.

[JoeD]

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.

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.

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by JoeD

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.

Agreed - that was something I mentioned in the feedback section. Some ability to "carry over" books would be nice. Some months I have a lot more free time to read than others, so I may only read one book this month but read ten next. If I can keep them, it's not as big an issue than if I can only read them during that month. And if I can only read them during the month, what happens when I'm ten pages from the end, the dapper Belgian detective is about to announce who murdered the butler, and the clock strikes 12:01 AM on the first of the next month?

I doubt the service will work with my reader though, at least not without ripping the DRM.

They mentioned bundling a reader along with the subscription a couple of times. I rather thought the lack of an "I'm not interested in that since I already have a reader, thanks, but I might have a look if your plan is compatible with the hardware I already own" button was something of an oversight. Well, it's the curse of e-books - we won't see an equivalent of Spotify or Netflix until we get something that will play back on generic hardware.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by roger the rabbit

As a British expatriate living in Spain I wonder if they will address the geographic restrictions issue.

If they do I would be very interested in the rent option as I am unable to use a public library.

I hope so. Then I could take advantage of this via my wife who used to live in the UK.

[JoeD]

Originally Posted by Pardoz

They mentioned bundling a reader along with the subscription a couple of times. I rather thought the lack of an "I'm not interested in that since I already have a reader, thanks, but I might have a look if your plan is compatible with the hardware I already own" button was something of an oversight. Well, it's the curse of e-books - we won't see an equivalent of Spotify or Netflix until we get something that will play back on generic hardware.

Agreed. I hope they go with both options. Say a 12-24 month plan that includes a subsidised ebook reader and in addition make an attempt to get their service on as many alternative readers as possible.

For a subscription service I'd take a whatever DRM was needed for each manufacturer's reader so long as the "to keep" ebooks were DRM free. It is after all in their interest to reach the widest market possible and the more hardware device makers they get on-board the more pressure there will be on the rest to either offer a similar service or make their devices compatible.

I doubt it'll be easy for them to get a decent service off the ground though, but it would be a really good step for the future of ebooks.