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

[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.