{"id":258756,"date":"2007-12-18T14:29:50","date_gmt":"2007-12-18T14:29:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2007\/12\/18\/the-unlimited-model\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:34:47","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:34:47","slug":"the-unlimited-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2007\/12\/18\/the-unlimited-model\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unlimited Model"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Wikert<\/a> makes a good point about the rise of the “all you can eat” subscription model and how this might play out in the book world:<\/p>\n

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As this BusinessWeek article<\/a> notes, the pay-per-song model might be living on borrowed time. All you can eat subscription models like Rhapsody are gaining popularity. It makes sense to me. After all, I don’t care how much music I “own”; I just care how much I have access to. Would I pay $12.99\/month for the right to fill up a 30-, 40- or 80-gig MP3 player with all the music I could possibly want? You bet, especially since I’ll know the door is always open to download even more as my interests and tastes change.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Now stop and think about how this applies to the book publishing world. Could you imagine a model where you pay $X\/month for access to an unlimited number of books? It’s never going to happen in the print world but I think this could be the killer app for the Kindle, a world where manufacturing and distribution costs are zero. Access to every single book in the entire Kindle library could be yours for a monthly fee. Assuming the monthly fee is reasonable this could be the model that really kick-starts the e-book industry.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Although I don’t think the Kindle presages the end-times, I’m personally not a big fan of e-books and would be a bit happier if I didn’t have to worry about acquiring electronic rights and whatnot. That said, I’ve been a big proponent of the “unlimited” model for a while. I subscribe to Rhapsody, to Netflix, and the idea of having unlimited access to as many books as you want, immediately and anywhere is sort of appealing. <\/p>\n

In other words, I’m not shelling out $400 bucks to buy “Kindle versions” of books (which apparently lack most footnotes), but under this model, I could see this catching on with a substantial nuimber of readers. For a while, I’ve been of the mindset that e-books would catch on when the product\/model available solved distribution problems. Allowing readers to “test the water” of as many books as they want, downloaded instantaneously to their little device, accomplishes just this . . . And in contrast to the Paperspine idea<\/a>, delivery would be instantaneous, and Amazon wouldn’t face the same inventory problems inevitable in the Paperspine model. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Wikert makes a good point about the rise of the “all you can eat” subscription model and how this might play out in the book world: As this BusinessWeek article notes, the pay-per-song model might be living on borrowed time. All you can eat subscription models like Rhapsody are gaining popularity. It makes sense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,8906],"class_list":["post-258756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-future-of-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258756"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":360386,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258756\/revisions\/360386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}