Saturday, May 12, 2012

Ebooks: a new publishing solution to an old business problem?

Ebooks: a new publishing solution to an old business problem?, article.
The rise in popularity of e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad presents a new market for magazine and newspaper publishers to explore

This idea hadn't occurred to me, but I think it's a great one.
For many years, micropayment were seen by many, like Jakob Nielsen, Guy Kawasaki, Scott McCloud, and well, me, as being the great solution to content sales on the web. Make a system where people could pay 10 or 25 cents per picture or article, that should work.
A decade ago I was invited to join a micropayment system/company, BitPay I think it was called, which Guy Kawasaki had a stake it. And I have reasons to believe that I was one of the biggest sellers for them. But in the end, they closed. And my own experience showed that when people had the option to buy content in large packages, these sold much better than selling it piecemeal, even though there was not any bulk pricing involved!

I suspect it is the sheer mental weight of making 200 "small" decisions rather than make one bigger one. Because contrary to what one might think, a "small" decision is not all that much less stressing than a larger one. Many people will be familiar with this scenario: having a hard time deciding whether to spend ten cents on a shopping bag, while deciding to buy a stereo system on the spur of the moment. It's the same mechanics at work, so fewer decisions is much less stressing.

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