The Bookseller.com

17th May 2008

Eoin Purcell is commissioning editor for Mercier Press, Ireland’s oldest independent publishing house. He writes a blog on what is happening to publishing and books at www.eoinpurcellsblog.com

A new business model?

18.10.07

I am not certain what constitutes a new business model, but certainly it ought to be something new at least. Which is why, despite all the noise about it, Radiohead's online freebie does not present a new model for publishers of music or books. What they have done is self publish an album via the internet, a trick that can hardly be seen as novel. One only has to look over sites like Lulu.com to see the truth of that, or surf the pages of myspace.com/music to see the freely available tracks of countless bands.

What makes their move so different is that they are enormously popular and enjoy great media attention. It helps too that they are an early adopter among the larger artists. If every band were to release their albums in the same fashion, the attention would be considerably less and if this system becomes the norm the hype will lessen if only because the delivery system will become boring.

Where you can credit Radiohead though is in showing that there are some customers who will pay for digital content even when they do not have to, something that all publishers ought to be happy to see. According to the New York Times, the average price paid was about \, for something they could get for free.

But there are other positive signs in the move too. Radiohead have shone a light on the demand and willingness to pay for digital content so long as it is delivered in a way people want it. DailyLit has stepped bravely into this space and offer, I would argue, a much more interesting model. The site has been providing readers with daily e-mails of digestible chunks of books that are in the public domain. Its new pay-per-read system is a clever reinvention of the paid subscription model for the age of e-mail. It provides the same daily e-mail of new and recently released books.

Subscription services seem to be the way to drag revenue from readers reluctant to pay for content on the web. The model emerging in Japan suggests this too. Short novels downloaded directly to mobile phones are growing quickly there and readers are happy to pay for the convenience. Readers are paying for a service as much as for the content itself.

The DailyLit model has a number of advantages that recommend it over the free download model. For one thing it allows the distributor to build a relationship with readers/buyers of content. It can collect information about their preferences; offer them trials of new books it thinks they might like. For another, such systems would also allow publishers to invest in debut authors or riskier less commercial projects tailoring the cost of each title to a certain reader, and allowing profitable authors to subsidise the cost of building up newer ones, much as bestsellers do today.

Of course there is no inherent reason why the system should be controlled by publishers and DailyLit's model is as much a threat to publishers as Radiohead's move. We need to spend more time considering the implications of these models for our future.  One thing is clear, the noise surrounding the Radiohead move has obscured the signal, that the world is changing and it is not always in our favour.

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