Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

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I think part of the problem is that publishers did a bad job of pricing their digital products and missed an opportunity to increase sales volume. In my opinion they got greedy thinking they could increase volume and prices at the same time, so digital products were priced way too high.

I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was around $250 / year for the cheap option that let me "borrow" 10 books a month. The problem for me was that I'd typically buy 2-3 books per year ($100-$150) and I owned more than 10 books total, so the subscription seemed like a bad deal by comparison. The "unlimited" (with limited downloads IIRC) was $500+ / year. That's a lot of books.

O'Reilly could have been the Spotify of tech books, but old school publishers were too scared to reassess their pricing. When the cost of distribution plummets, but results in a worse (ie: more expensive), product for your customers, it's not a shock to see those businesses struggle IMO, especially when the competition is free and "good enough".

I think it’s around 20/month now for O’Reilly learning (the new name for safari books). I’ve had it for around 5 years now, and I don’t ever recall having a limit on number of items. I feel like they have actually got better, with some really good video courses included as well. I’m just completing the second of two courses which are available elsewhere for $99 each, so I’ve almost paid for the year. I really like the idea of having this huge library I can dip into when I want to look something up, rather than getting lost in large amounts of low-quality blog posts online.

The only option I'm seeing now is $499/yr or $49/m. Do you have a better price somewhere?

Just looked it up and the website is showing me $49/month or $499/year.

https://www.oreilly.com/online-learning/pricing.html

The Spotify of books is a great way to look at it.

If a publisher had insanely high quality articles on everything, behind a paywall, I'd subscribe to $15 a month pretty quickly.

Every hour saved would pay for itself many times over.

The problem is having a wide enough array of content that such a site becomes the single go to. O'Reilly had that catalog, but I think the tech world had gotten much more complicated since then.

Spotify’s returns to creators are pitifully small, and since they’re basically a distributor not a publisher, they don’t offer advances on royalties.

So maybe the economics would disincentivize authorship.

I was thinking of everything being under one publishing house, basically a company that just writes high quality documentation and nothing else.

The "like spotify" was more in reference to pay once, get everything imaginable.

Sure, but the functional aspect immediately unpacks into commercial consequences.

This also explains the difference between publishers and distributors, and the dissimilar risks they accept.

I'd suggest something more like Netflix as a model; they are primarily a distributor and only very rarely a publisher; their library has a selection of standard classics, recently(ish) popular content for which the original publisher has more incentive to license than sell direct, plus rotating items of interest to keep the catalog feeling fresh for ongoing customers.

(note that even so-called "Netflix Original" content is mostly produced by other companies).

It's been thought of, of course. The search history of "Netflix for e-books" is in practice a mixture of junkyards like Scribd and "what-if" questions on Quora. There's likely a causality dilemma with achieving the catalog scale necessary for success, mediated by the conservative strategies and revenue fears of existing publishers, all of whose investors/owners are entrenched incumbents that see their businesses as perpetuities (steady, low-margin cash printers) rather than growth ventures.

Basically, they won't do it, until they see it can be done.

That would be Kindle Unlimited model, as far as I know they pay authors by pages read.

But I’m unsure how impactful revenue wise for an author can make or how sustainable is it long term.

Most of the books I see on Unlimited are either older books (there are some good gems), books that are already freely found on the internet or books that are scrappily put together.

“...by pages read.” That actually sounds great. I don’t want to read a book, I want access to knowledge. I want a great search engine that will surface the pages containing the info I need so I can read them and move on and that is usually a handful of pages from a book.

This could have a terrible incentive for authors to spread the information thin across a ton of pages to artificially increase their earnings, so we'll end up with books that are the equivalent of online recipes today where there are 3 pages of SEO garbage before the actual recipe.

That both has and hasn't happened with Spotify.

On the one hand, there are no 10 hour songs with some great part spread out randomly throughout that listeners have to find (obvious, and I think such a book wouldn't be successful either).

On the other hand there are tons of generated crap on Spotify, than sometimes sneaks into your playlists (even things contained text-to-speech advertisement).

I think all such platforms would need some kind of spam filter functionality and a good rating / statistics system so that quality content could be surfaced.

Also for selling digital goods regional pricing plays a big role in my opinion. Part of the reason why steam is so hugely successful.

Orielly learning comes free with ACM membership which is very affordable in developing countries. It really helped me.

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