Happy New Year!
Been kinda slow 'round here recently, need to catch up now.
So, er, who is going to AAS?
Seriously: what would it take to get Amazon, or Apple, say, to give me unlimited access to all current and future eBooks?
I like books.
We have a few thousand at home, including a healthy hundred or so eBooks by now, and the piles beside the bed now reach above the mattress - and it is a good thick mattress on a boxspring and tall frame - and I mean piles, at least one per household resident, excepting the cat.
But, much as I like buying books, browsing books, getting books for pressies (yes, 7 this holiday season - score!), and even to review... what I really want is all the books.
I want unlimited access to all the books, all the time, instantly.
What would that take?
Books are being digitised at a furious pace.
Current well selling books; new books that are electronically typeset anyway; future books; and the crowdsourced and google efforts to digitise the out of copyright classics and obscure literature.
Not to mention serious science literature like ADS and arXiv, but I already have unlimited instant access to those.
Clearly, sadly, my capacity to consume books is finite: certainly well over $300 per year, but I don't know if it goes much over $1,000 in a typical year - maybe on those occasions when I do a surge purchase of reference books or texts pertaining to a new area of interest.
So, what is the fair net present value of my future purchases?
What ought Amazon or Apple etc be willing to accept as a lump sum payment to give me unlimited access to all current and future eBooks.
At my current purchase rate, $10,000 would be fair, unfortunately, because though it is a rational trade-off, the psychology of such a large up-front pay-off is not good.
Sticker shock.
But... I'm probably an above average buyer, I'm guessing, so to maximize net, they ought to lower the up-front price to something closer to the fair price for the medianmean book buyer...
so I'd be, like, a loss leader.
Now, $1,000, we could be talking - probably get few hundred million $ in up front capital and reserved for future royalty payments and costs, and the marginal cost of distributing each eBook is vanishingly small.
Main danger is gratuitous downloading of never-to-be-read books, costing a fortune in nominal royalties.
Kinda like the "Brief History of Time" phenomenon gone wild.
Good for authors, bad for publishers, but then production costs are way down and authors deserve more.
Go for it.
Could be the Big New Thing!
Somebody? Please?
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So you're looking for a deal in which you give people money now to do their jobs in the coming years? Good luck with that.
There has to be some kind of up front expenditure to get this thing off the ground, but for keeping it going, perhaps a subscription service would do the job. Would you spend $100 per year for access to this library? $50? $10? The people in charge of this library would probably also have to limit access to new stuff (say, two years old or newer) so that the economics work for creating new content.
I don't get it. Assuming inflation, paying as you go seems a better deal. Don't you right now have access to every single digital book ever published by way of your credit card and account at Amazon and Apple? (and Baen and wherever) Are you on some kind of banned list or what?
I think a subscription service seems like the best implementation of this idea. I do think it's a very interesting idea. The alternative is an iTunes-like one-click paying for each book as you go, which would be easier for publishers to keep track of.
Crazy, I know...
Journals of course thrive on this: I pay them now, in the hope that their brilliant editors will continue to provide wonderful future content.
Then paying now for longer term future access is just a matter of what the fair net present value is - will the source continue in business and provide good content? will I be alive? will my capacity to consume content go up or down?
Several of the journals I have subscribed to asked me to pay for multi-year future subscriptions, because of the overhead cost of processing renewals.
I did so. Now they send me equally frequent requests for gift subscriptions etc...
Anyway: the real problem is whether demand is predictable, will I start grabbing far more books than I can read? And, the payment model - journals pay authors flat fees and own the content, books pay by royalties that currently get larger for large sales. That'd have to change, something like standard mass production cost savings where cost per item declines like N^1/3 or so - if you get $1 per book for the first 1000, then you get $0.1 per book when you are million books.
That works if sales overall go up enough as they get cheaper.
We'll see.
Information wants to be free.