‘Want “War and Peace” Online? How About 20 Pages at a Time?’
NYT article. I do wonder about the costs of the new plans and the restrictions. Excerpt:
The Random House model calls for consumers to be able to buy access to a book for, say, 5 cents a page for most books and higher amounts, like 25 cents a page, for cookbooks and other specialty publications. It calls for users to gain online access, though not to be able to copy or print the page. But “if consumers absolutely demand certain kinds of access,” like the ability to print, Mr. Sarnoff said, “it would be important to provide that.”
Related: Busy day for digital books, from Search Engine Watch. Of special interest: Watch’s listing of free search services, includng the 111,000-title Digital Book Index, through which 72,000 e-books and other documents are free.
Also of interest: Google Offers Index of Public Domain Works (via LISNews) and related AP article and Google Brought to Book over Peter Pan in the London Times and Microsoft in deal with British Library in the Financial Times (via LISNews).
November 4th, 2005 at 3:17 pm
5 cents a page is highway robbery.
and 25 cents a page? unconscionable.
those greedy little boys…
i can’t wait to displace them…
-bowerbird
November 5th, 2005 at 4:20 pm
and did you notice?
the publishers have already
“figured it out” that _they_
will get 4 out of those 5 cents.
evidently, they’re quite used to
taking the lion’s share of things.
i presume that for the pages
that cost 25 cents instead,
the publishers will want 24.
after all, pumping out a page
should cost the same, no matter
how valuable the underlying content,
right? their greed is unbelievable!
now, they say that they will “share”
those 4 cents (on a 5-cent page)
with the author — how kind of them –
but we already know what kind of
royalty structure they have in mind,
don’t we? authors have traditionally
received an average of about 10% –
usually ranging between 6% and 14% —
so the author would get about half a cent,
while the publisher grabs 3 and a half cents.
oh, and although it isn’t said directly,
the title of the piece refers to buying
pages “20 at a time”, which makes me
think what the publishers have in mind
is a _minimum_purchase_ of $1.
let’s disintermediate these thieves!
-bowerbird