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Publishers Realizing There's Revenue In Selling Ebooks Of Old Content... Even If It's Available For Free
from the you-can-compete-with-free dept
We've been explaining for years that you absolutely can compete with free, and in the last few months a bunch of news publications have figured out an interesting strategy that's working surprisingly well: taking old content from their magazines/newspapers/blogs/etc. and repackaging them as cheap ebooks. And, even though much of that content is available already for free, the convenient package combined with the low price (and the rapid spread of tablets and ebook readers) seems to just hit the sweet spot that makes people willing to pay. We'd actually been planning to do something similar ourselves with some of our past content, just as an experiment, and still plan to do so soon, but it's great to see how well it seems to be working for a variety of publications. It's not a paywall since all the content is available for free, but it is about giving people a reason to buy.
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A certain irony...
Then below the article are links to more stories... stuck behind the GigaOm paywall.
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Maybe they should take their own advice?
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People will pay for...
Context,
Intelligent linking, IE: Connections they would have otherwise missed
Filtering,
Good, useful aggregating.
At least I will. Even if the source material is as free as crtl-c/ctrl-v those features, even if only fairly well implemented are enough to get me to pay money for what I could get for free.
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All I need to do now is find a very easy way of doing something that people don't normally like or can be bothered to do and sell it to them at a (not so)reasonable price...
If only there was a 'thinking machine' available to help me
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Kevin Kelly Generatives
I keep going back to that article for business model ideas (along with Mike's general theory on the economics of free post). It really sums it up very well, if you've read Mike and Kevin Kelly, none of these things look surprising at all, it just makes sense.
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Re: People will pay for...
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Re:
And the seller would experience some level of difficulty retrieving it after being told they lacked the rights to sell it.
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Re:
psssst ... self cleaning toilet.
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All I've ever seen from my local paper is expensive, hardcover vanity books with articles by a single writer that just strokes their ego.
Our paper's much more interested in locking all it's content away in archives hoping you'll pay $2 just to read one article.
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See http://www.baen.com/library/
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