Last week Sesame Street announced a flat-fee eBook store. The idea of bundled pricing for books is not entirely new, but it is perhaps a sign of a coming flood of creative pricing models and bundling for eBooks.
Is the book world ready for creative eBook pricing bundles? It should be, but it isn’t. After all, retail book sellers have a point of purchase mentality, where they sell consumers a book (either print or eBook) and almost primarily through individual retail transactions.
But what if, like with movies, they started to bundle their goods, like Sesame Street is doing, in “all-you-can-eat” packages? In other words, what if they created “Netflix subscriptions for eBooks?”
Certainly, book subscription models are not new, as BookSwim has tiered pricing for access to multiple titles and ships them to your door. But we’re still talking actual physical books and the pricing is still fairly high for access to more than a handful of titles a month. Not that we can blame BookSwim or those like it for higher pricing, as shipping physical books by mail can be an expensive business.
But with Sesame Street’s plan, you can have access to all the digital titles for an annual fee of just $24.99 a year. Sure, they only have 121 titles, but no doubt it’s a great value for those who have children and want access to quality content.
So the question now is, when will BookSwim or other more general web-based book rental services start to offer subscriptions for eBooks? Let’s face it, it’s only a matter of time. But like always, the issue around “renting vs. buying” with subscriptions, particularly when it comes to recent titles, is a matter of rights. Most book publishers today are likely going to resist seeing their NY Times bestseller bundled into a $20 a month eBook rental package. The payment of royalties on such a transaction is complicated and, no doubt, lower than a straight purchase transaction, even on low-cost sites for eBooks like Amazon.
What do you think? Will we start to see more Netflix for eBooks for a broader set of titles, or will we only see single publishers with niche content – like Sesame Street – create their own limited subscription packages?
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Macstone23
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