2 ms·

The Spotify of books is a great way to look at it. If a publisher had insanely high quality articles on everything, behind a paywall, I'd subscribe to $15 a mo

The Spotify of books is a great way to look at it. If a publisher had insanely high quality articles on everything, behind a paywall, I'd subscribe to $15 a month pretty quickly. Every hour saved would pay for itself many times over. The problem is having a wide enough array of content that such a site becomes the single go to. O'Reilly had that catalog, but I think the tech world had gotten much more complicated since then.

inopinatus 6y ago
Spotify’s returns to creators are pitifully small, and since they’re basically a distributor not a publisher, they don’t offer advances on royalties. So maybe the economics would disincentivize authorship.
- com2kid 6y ago
  I was thinking of everything being under one publishing house, basically a company that just writes high quality documentation and nothing else. The "like spotify" was more in reference to pay once, get everything imaginable.
  - inopinatus 6y ago
    Sure, but the functional aspect immediately unpacks into commercial consequences. This also explains the difference between publishers and distributors, and the dissimilar risks they accept. I'd suggest something more like Netflix as a model; they are primarily a distributor and only very rarely a publisher; their library has a selection of standard classics, recently(ish) popular content for which the original publisher has more incentive to license than sell direct, plus rotating items of interest to keep the catalog feeling fresh for ongoing customers. (note that even so-called "Netflix Original" content is mostly produced by other companies). It's been thought of, of course. The search history of "Netflix for e-books" is in practice a mixture of junkyards like Scribd and "what-if" questions on Quora. There's likely a causality dilemma with achieving the catalog scale necessary for success, mediated by the conservative strategies and revenue fears of existing publishers, all of whose investors/owners are entrenched incumbents that see their businesses as perpetuities (steady, low-margin cash printers) rather than growth ventures. Basically, they won't do it, until they see it can be done.
tmlee 6y ago
That would be Kindle Unlimited model, as far as I know they pay authors by pages read. But I’m unsure how impactful revenue wise for an author can make or how sustainable is it long term. Most of the books I see on Unlimited are either older books (there are some good gems), books that are already freely found on the internet or books that are scrappily put together.
- hellisothers 6y ago
  “...by pages read.” That actually sounds great. I don’t want to read a book, I want access to knowledge. I want a great search engine that will surface the pages containing the info I need so I can read them and move on and that is usually a handful of pages from a book.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    This could have a terrible incentive for authors to spread the information thin across a ton of pages to artificially increase their earnings, so we'll end up with books that are the equivalent of online recipes today where there are 3 pages of SEO garbage before the actual recipe.
    - e_proxus 6y ago
      That both has and hasn't happened with Spotify. On the one hand, there are no 10 hour songs with some great part spread out randomly throughout that listeners have to find (obvious, and I think such a book wouldn't be successful either). On the other hand there are tons of generated crap on Spotify, than sometimes sneaks into your playlists (even things contained text-to-speech advertisement). I think all such platforms would need some kind of spam filter functionality and a good rating / statistics system so that quality content could be surfaced.

inopinatus 6y ago

Spotify’s returns to creators are pitifully small, and since they’re basically a distributor not a publisher, they don’t offer advances on royalties. So maybe the economics would disincentivize authorship.

com2kid 6y ago
I was thinking of everything being under one publishing house, basically a company that just writes high quality documentation and nothing else. The "like spotify" was more in reference to pay once, get everything imaginable.
- inopinatus 6y ago
  Sure, but the functional aspect immediately unpacks into commercial consequences. This also explains the difference between publishers and distributors, and the dissimilar risks they accept. I'd suggest something more like Netflix as a model; they are primarily a distributor and only very rarely a publisher; their library has a selection of standard classics, recently(ish) popular content for which the original publisher has more incentive to license than sell direct, plus rotating items of interest to keep the catalog feeling fresh for ongoing customers. (note that even so-called "Netflix Original" content is mostly produced by other companies). It's been thought of, of course. The search history of "Netflix for e-books" is in practice a mixture of junkyards like Scribd and "what-if" questions on Quora. There's likely a causality dilemma with achieving the catalog scale necessary for success, mediated by the conservative strategies and revenue fears of existing publishers, all of whose investors/owners are entrenched incumbents that see their businesses as perpetuities (steady, low-margin cash printers) rather than growth ventures. Basically, they won't do it, until they see it can be done.

tmlee 6y ago

That would be Kindle Unlimited model, as far as I know they pay authors by pages read. But I’m unsure how impactful revenue wise for an author can make or how sustainable is it long term. Most of the books I see on Unlimited are either older books (there are some good gems), books that are already freely found on the internet or books that are scrappily put together.

hellisothers 6y ago
“...by pages read.” That actually sounds great. I don’t want to read a book, I want access to knowledge. I want a great search engine that will surface the pages containing the info I need so I can read them and move on and that is usually a handful of pages from a book.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  This could have a terrible incentive for authors to spread the information thin across a ton of pages to artificially increase their earnings, so we'll end up with books that are the equivalent of online recipes today where there are 3 pages of SEO garbage before the actual recipe.
  - e_proxus 6y ago
    That both has and hasn't happened with Spotify. On the one hand, there are no 10 hour songs with some great part spread out randomly throughout that listeners have to find (obvious, and I think such a book wouldn't be successful either). On the other hand there are tons of generated crap on Spotify, than sometimes sneaks into your playlists (even things contained text-to-speech advertisement). I think all such platforms would need some kind of spam filter functionality and a good rating / statistics system so that quality content could be surfaced.