Could Spotify’s business model work for ebooks?
If the record industry had come up with Spotify a decade ago, it might not be in the mess it’s in today. The free, ad-supported version could have kept people away from the pirate networks, and while the paid-for numbers aren’t huge (250,000 paying subscribers at the beginning of 2010, compared to 7 million users in total) Spotify is still persuading them to pay for music – something that’s eluded plenty of other legal services. So could the same kind of service work for books, bringing novels to the massed ranks of Kindle, Nook, Reader and iPad owners? It’s not as bizarre as it sounds, because we have real-world equivalents for both its free and subscriber services. Libraries give books away for nothing – or seem to; in reality authors get a little bit of money in the form of Public Lending Right (PLR) royalties, a gap that online ad revenues could easily plug – while book clubs have offered heavily discounted prices to subscribers for decades. Could similar ideas work online? Sara Ll
