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Giving it away & chunking the chapters: New business models
February 11, 2008
Two major publishers are now gambling with new strategies for boosting book sales.
HarperCollins announced it will provide complete access to select popular titles. The publisher's Browse Inside: Try Before You Buy, feature, which formerly include segments of books, will include full content of such titles as: Paulo Coelho’s The Witch of Portobello; Roger Director's I Dream in Blue: Life, Death, and the New York Giants; Mark Halperin's The Undecided Voter's Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from, and How You Can Choose; Robert Irvine's (Food Network) Mission: Cook!: My Life, My Recipes, and Making the Impossible Easy; and Erin Hunter's Warriors: Into the Wild, the first in her animal fantasy series for children.
The catch: the books are free to read online in the publisher's reader, but you cannot download them, move them to an iPod, or make copies. Books stay online for a month. HarperCollins promises to upload a different Coelho title each month this year.
This is very cool for those of us who love to read online, as well as those of us who like to read a little or a lot before we buy. It's kinda like standing around the bookstore flipping through as many pages as we like. It's a strategy that works with me. I seldom exit without a full bag.
Random House is trying a different sales-boosting strategy. It will sell book chapters iTunes-style. Each of six chapters and the epilogue of Made to Stick, a 2007 title on effective communication, may be purchased for $2.99. These chapters are downloadable and may be read with Adobe Digital Editions. Random House promotes its new model:
Sometimes what you want is a slice instead of the whole pie. That's why we're offering a new reading experience-- the ability to purchase individual chapters. Imagine that! Downloading and reading exactly the part of a book that meets your needs.
Chip Heath and Dan Heath's bestselling book Made to Stick is an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to effectively communicate their ideas. In each stand-alone chapter, the authors offer valuable lessons on the key principles that make messages stick. You can choose the chapter that's right for you and download it for just $2.99. The introduction and index are available for free with the purchase of any chapter. And don't miss the information-packed Epilogue filled with great tips for crafting sticky messages.
So go ahead, have your slice and read it too.
This appears a model made for chunkable nonfiction--cookbooks, collections of essays, etc. But I wonder what happens to some titles when the context of adjoining chapters or the expression of a prolonged argument go missing. I suspect musicians had to deal with similar concerns regarding segmenting of their albums into iTunes.
Posted by Joyce Valenza on February 11, 2008 | Comments (3)
