The hot new trend in the digital arena are these eBook subscriptions that are popping up all of a sudden. There's Scribd, Librify, Oyster, eReetah and I'm sure more are coming. Basically you pay a very low monthly subscription price for unlimited reading of selected ebooks. Is this a viable business model for these companies? My thoughts are that this is basically the same type of business model that gyms use. They get a lot of people to join up for a very low monthly price and they then hope that nobody shows up to use the facilities. (I can't tell you how many times I've done this).
None of these services can make money if they have voracious readers who are going to read more than two books per month because they are paying the publishers full price each time a book is read. This ends up costing more than the member is paying for the service each month. But if the reader comes on and only previews a book or takes a long time reading one book, the service is only paying out a few dollars and will come out ahead.
Kensington Publishing has agreed to provide title for some of these services and we're finalizing contracts on others. I personally feel that it's a model that we should experiment with and see how it performs. We're getting interesting feedback from some of these services. We learn how long it takes a reader to read one of our books as well as if they started a book and decided not to finish reading it. What we end up doing with this data is a different matter as I'm not really sure how we're going to utilize it at this time.
Have any of you tried any of these services yet and what do you think?
Steve
I haven't tried this but when I think of the reading habits of a lot of romance and mystery readers (sometimes several books a week, but certainly several per month), it definitely seems that these services could end up losing money. It's just not the same as going to the gym (I wouldn't go either, lol), since people are reading everywhere on every kind of device nowadays.
ReplyDeleteI don't really seeing it working well either but if you get a lot of people to sign up and they aren't the voracious readers like most romance readers are, they might be onto something. It will be an interesting experiment.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about this. I have agree that I don't see these new digital arenas making a profit. It's something to watch in the future. Again, there are so many choices out there now, I can't see the profit here.
ReplyDeleteThere's so many companies going into this side of the business; they must see something that I don't see. I guess we'll know soon enough how this works out.
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