Interesting Links for 15-04-2013

[andrewducker]

• Jacquard Looms! I didn't know there were still working ones!
  (tags: history computers clothing )
• Towards psychohistory - the limits of harnessing data to predict the future of society.
  (tags: thefuture predictions society )
• Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride.
  (tags: chemistry dangerous )
• Be careful on your birthday
  (tags: birthday

Comments

[autopope]

WRT. ebook subscriptions: this is WIRED. I'd give it more credence if it was coming out of Publishers' Weekly or a similar trade journal.

Yes, Tim Waterstone is planning something innovative involving short fiction ... the term for this business model is "a short story magazine", and it's only a couple of centuries old, but everything old is new again if you just prefix it with the letter "e-", right?

Before deciding ahead of time that Sir Tim is going to make it work, it's worth taking a salutary look at the surviving SF magazines. SF is the only literary field where the short story really survived as a commercial form much past the late 1950s, and even so, they're living hand-to-mouth. The "digital revolution" hasn't exactly resurrected the sales of Analog and Asimov's SF magazine; it has just about kept them on life support. And that's a field where short fiction is popular.

Baen have been selling monthly bundles of e-books for a decade. DRM-free, no less, in all the file formats the readers ask for. It's a good tactic, but it hasn't set the publishing world on fire.

[andrewducker]

Thanks, that was pretty much what I was expecting :->

I have been curious as to whether a subscription model would work for books. It seems to be working for music (insofar as I'm currently spending £120/year on music that I could download for free if I felt like it).

Whether people would be willing to do the same for books, and what the value would need to be to make it sustainable, I don't know. (I'd do it, and then feel much happier trying out the first chapter of a bunch of books to see whether I'd want to read the rest.)

[kiffkin]

While I agree with your general point about learning from existing markets, you seem to have overlooked that short stories - usually romance stories - in women's magazines (e.g. Woman's Weekly, My Weekly, Best) are still popular. Like the article says, the romance genre is thriving, and there's a massive potential target there between magazine readers, book buyers and library book borrowers.

[autopope]

Genre romance isn't merely thriving; it's more than 50% of total fiction sales (at least in the USA, and probably also in the UK).

That's where I'd expect to see a subscription model for books show up first.

[coughingbear]

Mills & Boon already do e-book subscriptions (they had long offered paper book subscriptions, of course).

[danieldwilliam]

Why do you think short fiction struggled post 1950 and does a subscription service do anything to change the environment for short fiction?

[andrewducker]

I get a free sci-fi short in my email every morning. I usually read it while waking up. The quality is terribly variable, but for short stories I can live with that.

http://dailysciencefiction.com/