By Edward Nawotka
As noted in today’s feature story by Javier Celaya, the all-you-can-eat “Spotify model for e-books” is tricky to monetize properly. But would it be superior if e-books were offered on an à la carte, or if you prefer, “chunking” model — meaning a model that offers readers access to books, say, a chapter at a time, for a price that upon completion of the book reaches a price equivalent to a standard e-book?
The model is already in place in numerous academic and professional markets, as well as in some specialist trade markets. Typically, these subscription models focus on works for which there is an urgent need for access to a specific portion of a book. But the majority of trade books are often read under far less urgent circumstances and the books cannot be as easily parsed.
With an à la carte offering, where users are fed books chapters as a time, the inclination to purchase a full print or e-book edition is likely to grow provided the content is to their liking. This has increased potential convert readers into buyers — either to read the entire book for themselves to give the book as a gift.
What’s more, an à la carte subscription is unlikely to exceed even the cost of an average paperback, which might be enough to appeal to more casual browsers, offering an opportunity to convert them to to book buyers.
In many ways the à la carte model already exists. Google Books already offers previews of books, many of them with — ahem — chunks of the books missing, all in order to entice readers to buy actual editions of the titles. Several parts are missing — such as pricing, licensing, and distribution agreements among them — but the elements are there.
Tell us what you think in the comments.
4 Comments
à la carte subscription makes sense. It is exactly in line – in digital version – with what used to be done in the 19th century, when Balzac published his novels in installments in small local papers, bought a few cents at a time. His readers became so enthusiastic that they would rush to buy the paper as soon as it came out in order to read the next installment…
This could be a great boon to new writers who have not established a following yet. Give away a sample chap; sell the next one to the reader (small investment, easy sale after a great first chap) and once you have the reader that far into the book, he should be yours, chunk by chunk. Great way for new writers to build a following.
I also second what Claude Nougat says about the 19thC model. Dickens did it. Now, can we?
Before finalizing the http://eBookFling.com swapping model, my team certainly pondered a chunking model like this. While I think it’s lucrative, the one thing I don’t agree with is that the sum of the chapter prices should not match the full price of the book, but rather exceed the price of the book. iTunes album prices are usually less than the cost of all tracks if bought individually; or the artist may throw in extra tracks that are only available with the entire album purchase. This is an incentive for purchasing (and experiencing) the entire album rather than just purchasing a few songs.
With a similar book model, if chapters were bought individually, they should exceed the full book price to make purchasing the full book a more attractive deal. The higher price of individual chapters would also counteract lower revenue from a single chapter purchase if an individual buys almost all of the chapters on an individual basis.
But why would anyone pay more than full price???
To answer this, I’ll use my own purchasing habits as an indicator. I was exposed to the pilot episode of Workaholics on Hulu but no other episodes were available. iTunes was selling the other episodes at $1.99 each or I could buy a “season pass” (access to all episodes) for about $12. Since I’d only seen one episode, I didn’t want to risk buying the whole season… so I started buying episodes individually. TURNS OUT I LOVE THIS SHOW! I’ve already purchased 4 episodes and spent $8, so I’m well beyond the point of saving money with a $12 Season Pass. Looks like I’ll keep buying $1.99 episodes. If the full season has 12 episodes, it looks like I’ll end up spending double the price, but that’s the risk I took to make sure I wasn’t committing to something I wasn’t sure if I would like.
Bottom line is that authors and publishers may have the ability to make MORE money on a model like this.
- George Burke
CEO, eBookFling.com
An interesting and potentially valuable concept. Particularly if payment could be made very quickly, almost automatically, even for small amounts like twenty five cents. Parents could open special book accounts through some central source for their children with each payment restricted to such a small amount and no more than one or two per day with a maximum amount of money set by the parents. Parents might value this as it would encourage reading by their children, and the children would value their independence.