Could Spotify work for ebooks?
As long term readers will know, I’m amazed by the way in which the music business spent more than ten years missing every business opportunity the Internet brought them, effectively handing their entire business over to the pirates. Services such as Spotify should have turned up a long time ago.
Could the same kind of thing work for ebooks? Is there enough ad money to go round? Do book readers want to social network?
we have real-world equivalents for both its free and subscriber services. Libraries give books away for nothing – or seem to; in reality authors get a little bit of money in the form of Public Lending Right (PLR) royalties, a gap that online ad revenues could easily plug – while book clubs have offered heavily discounted prices to subscribers for decades.
Could similar ideas work online?
4 Responses to “Could Spotify work for ebooks?”
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Gary on February 23rd, 2010
Wow, I used the word “business” a lot in that post, didn’t I? Business.
Heather on February 23rd, 2010
Hmm? Book readers do indeed social network. A bit like a good used bookstore, through that I’ve been able to discover books I never would have heard of otherwise.
Gary on February 24th, 2010
Yeah, I didn’t really put the point across very well in the piece – what I was getting at was the idea of a social network built into a book reading/selling app, social networking as part of a wider business model.
I do think Goodreads addresses the big flaw with the Amazon “get an algorithm to do it” model, though.
Squander Two on February 24th, 2010
Oh, I don’t know. Amazon’s recommendations are pretty shoddy, but I find they tally almost exactly with the recommendations I get from real people, i.e. they keep telling me to buy Massive Attack records.