Ebooks as radio shows!

[elf]

Ooh! Shiny! New thought about ebook distribution, comparing it not to books, which have high fixed costs and substantial, non-reducible per-unit costs, but to radio--which has high fixed costs, and almost nonexistent marginal costs. Sound familiar? I don't think I'd ever thought of ebook subscription services like this--not as comparable to a book club, but like public television or radio, where a few paying customers were happily supporting the entertainment of a lot more free users.

The Public Broadcasting model for ebooks, by Eric Hellman

New York Public Radio, which produces Radiolab, produces other award winning programs and operates three of America top public radio stations, all on an annual budget of just under 48 million dollars. That works out to $130,854 per day. If you spread that expense over the 19 million potential listeners in the New Yourk Metropolitan area, it works out to 0.69 pennies per day per person.

But it doesn’t even cost that much to listen to WNYC or WQXR. Most people pay even less, zero pennies, to be exact. ... A relatively small number of us send money to become “members” of the station. The $120 my family contributed turned into a deduction on the tax return I completed yesterday. Most people who listen don’t contribute, but they’re never referred to as “pirates” or “thieves”.

The reason this works anyway is that radio has large fixed costs and infinitesimal marginal costs.

Emphasis added, 'cos I had to. THERE ARE ALL THOSE PEOPLE, getting FREE COPIES of COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL piped into their homes! We're teaching our kids to be damned thieves and pirates, watching Sesame Street and not paying for it!

Comments

[finch]

That's so perfect that now that I've heard it I wonder why I've never heard it before. XD

[elf]

Because publishers are fighting really really hard to convince us all that ebooks work just like pbooks, with transferability exchanged for portability & instant delivery.

They're not *looking* for different economic models that could work for ebooks. They have an economic model they're content with (not entirely happy; it's not been doing so well--but they understand it); they don't want to learn a whole new system of accounting to go with the whole new headache of workflow attached to file conversion.

[yourlibrarian]

It's an interesting argument, thanks for passing along the link.

[elf]

I'm not convinced it could work the way radio/tv works, but I'd love to see it explored more.

I'm not thrilled at the idea of an author/publisher version of the RIAA or MPAA, but I could hope that a new org, influenced by a lot of indie authors who want their stuff available, could avoid some of their pitfalls.

It deals with the issue of "how are you gonna find the good stuff in the endless digital slushpile": Book Jockeys. We could have BJs for our ebooks.

(And the "cloud" people will start screaming that this is the answer, and they're gonna have to face the same reality that radio did when cassette tapes got common: people can keep the content to enjoy later.)

[isis]

Oh, INTERESTING.

[elf]

I'm still boggling over the possibilities here. A lot of people point out that books aren't like music; you don't re-read them dozens of times (for the most part, except for maybe extra-special favorites); they take a lot longer to absorb; authors can't offer live performances to make up on the sales of copies, and so on.

But online, we *could* stream books as well as we stream music (better, usually; text uses a lot less bytes than sound). Just thinking of how to set up a radio-esque system of "(almost) anyone can log in & read the books; we just need X subscribers at $Y per year to make this viable" makes my brain hit weird little twists.

[syderia]

Most people who listen don’t contribute, but they’re never referred to as “pirates” or “thieves”.
Except that they were, back when audio tapes first came out. And since the radio owners couldn't forbid then, they turned to cutting slightly the ending of songs, and merging the end of one into the beginning of the next one so people registering them wouldn't have a very high quality song.
With an e-book, you have an actual copy of the work, so I would say that the difference between e-books and radio is about the same than between Hulu and getting a file through P2P.

Radios are also typically paid by advertising, or public subventions, and the advertising model for electronic content is one they tried to reproduce.

[elf]

There's an ability to offer a lower-quality copy of the work, making them "streaming e-paper" or some such, with low-res image PDFs available as downloads, equivalent to screencaps. Anyone who wanted to put the work into it could have a good version (unlike taping from the radio, where there's no way to improve the quality), but the amount of work involved is so high that very few people would bother--especially if access were reasonably priced.

The big problem isn't quality or downloadability; it's licensing. There's no book equivalent of the RIAA to allow companies to sell access to books-of-choice for a pre-established fee. (And I'm not sure I want one. But I want it considered.)

And yeah, it's obviously not going to work to just set up "streaming book channels" paid for by ads & membership funding. But I'd love more consideration of the idea, of ways that ebooks could be presented as so tremendously different from the way pbooks are sold and shared and archived, that publishers stop acting like ebooks are directly competing with hardcovers.

Ads are very, very problematic for ebooks. Not just because people don't want their reading interrupted by ads, but because current ebook models don't allow the ads to be worth paying for, from the advertisers' viewpoint. An ad in a downloaded book is seen by, what, up to 6 people legitimately? If the book is shared outside of legit channels, the ads will almost certainly be stripped. Advertisers aren't going to cut the cost of the book in half to reach 1-6 viewers.

[cathepsut]

You don't have to pay some sort of braodcasting fee in the US for your radio, TV, car radio? Just wondering... We pay quite a bit in Germany and the UK has something similar, can't remember what it's called right now. So technically all Germans and Brits with radios are paying customers. And if we don't pay and get caught, we get fined.

[elf]

There's no tax/fee to have access to tv & radio in the US. I'm aware there is in the UK; didn't know about Germany. And in some countries, there's a fee/tax on recording media (tapes, CDs) that goes to benefit performers in some roundabout way, on the theory that some of those media will be used to make copies of copyrighted material.

There's *no* way any politician in the US could successfully propose any kind of "internet tax." And if it were proposed, there'd be no way to enforce payment, and the lawsuits about "I don't have to pay that because ..." would be epic monstrosities of advanced buzzword hype.

I don't know if a tax would be "bad" or not (although it seems weird to me, 'cos I grew up without any tax on access-to-media-content), but I do know there's no way to make it happen.