ENTRIES TAGGED "lending"
Ebook lending vs. ownership
Why not borrow since you're not really buying anyway?
In an earlier article called Free and the medium vs. the message I excerpted liberally from a terrific short ebook by Joshua Gans called Information Wants to Be Shared. (Buy the ebook direct from HBR’s website, use the code ADINFO1 you’ll only pay 99 cents, btw.) I’d like to revisit and excerpt from that title one more time and focus on the subscription model Gans sees for the book industry.
New life for used ebooks
Old ebooks and clever thinking can create new opportunities for publishers.
I’ve got quite a few ebooks in two different accounts that I’ve read and will never read again. I’ll bet you do, too. In the print world, we’d pass those along to friends, resell them or donate them to the local library. Good luck doing any of those things with an ebook.
Once you buy an ebook, you’re pretty much stuck with it. That’s yet another reason why consumers want low ebook prices. Ebooks are lacking some of the basic features of a print book, so of course they should be lower-priced. I realize that’s not the only reason consumers want low ebook prices, but it’s definitely a contributing factor. I’d be willing to pay more for an ebook if I knew I could pass it along to someone else when I’m finished with it.
Tools of Change for Publishing Newsletter: November 10, 2011
Books in Browsers 2011, ebook DRM and automated writing.
A Books in Browsers 2011 wrap-up, the perils of ebook DRM, and an author's journey toward automated writing are highlighted in the 11/10/11 edition of the TOC Newsletter.
The problem with Amazon's Kindle Owners' Lending Library
The Kindle Lending Library needs a pay-for-performance model, not a flat fee.
For Amazon's new lending program to be mutually beneficial, the flat-fee compensation model needs to be replaced by a usage spectrum: The more a title is borrowed, the higher the fee to the publisher and author.