Book People Archive

Re: A Few Questions About Pey-Per-View

The obvious answer to this set of questions is that this is not how
pay-per-view works or is going to work and anybody who thinks otherwise
hasn't studied the problem.  Pay-per-view is largely being promoted by
entertainment companies, which believe (wrongly, in my opinion) that this is
a way of capturing more revenue by identifying high-profile events (e.g., a
sporting match) and marrying the event to a specific set of motivated
consumers.  The economic problem that this poses is that the cost of
marketing will soar (because EACH property has to be marketed to EACH
consumer), which will mean that there will an increasing thirst for backing
the kind of properties that can support the marketing expense, which in turn
means that only a sliver of total production will get pushed this way.  So
pay-per-view will become a high-end mechanism for mass entertainment.

No book has every reached a true mass audience (the Bible is the exception),
so this entire scheme isn't going to fly.  Increasingly books will be
aggregated and offered in tiered subscription plans, much as we purchase
wireless phone service today.  Modest users pay $10/month for a set of
aggregated texts, immoderate (!) users $50, etc.  Occasional users may pay a
day rate (think of high speed Internet access in a hotel room:  all you can
eat for $10 for 24 hours).  While some licenses will be purchased by highly
motivated consumers, increasingly organizations, for-profit and nonprofit,
will purchase community licenses.  This is already happening and is not
revolutionary. For example, take a look at the Grolier encyclopedia licenses
now sold to public libraries, which permit user dial-in from outside the
library site.

The various tools (concordances, word frequency counts) M. Hart asks about
will be part of the aggregated service.  This is already happening, though I
am disappointed in the first instantiations (NetLibrary, Questia, etc.).
Generally, look for the value migration to move from the client to the
server as far as tools are concerned (file-sharing, esp. of rich media
files, is a likely exception).

This will have implications for publishing as well, as publishers
increasingly will work in categories, the better to market to target
audiences.  Think of the Dover Publications list mapped onto cyberspace,
surrounded by powerful tools, and marketed to libraries.  Lower production
costs, higher editorial value, and lower sales and distribution costs.
The going rate for a user of the Grolier products is (if I remember
correctly) $.45/year.

The dystopian pay-per-view world M. Hart implicitly critiques is not going
to happen, but not for moral reasons but because no one can make money at it
with books.  This doesn't mean that some publishers won't try.

Joseph J. Esposito
613 Spring St.
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
<mailto: espositoj@[redacted]
(831) 425-1143
(831) 471-2801 (fax)
(831) 254-0306 (wireless)
----- Original Message -----
From: Michael S. Hart <hart@[redacted]>
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2001 4:37 AM
Subject: [BP] A Few Questions About Pey-Per-View


> A Few Questions About Pay-Per-View
>
> Suppose someone wants to run some searches on a pay-per-view book,
> does each search consitute one reading of the book?
>
> What if someone wants to run a concordance program on this book?
>
> Do a word frequency count?
>
> What if someone wants to compare two pages over and over again in
> extreme detail to see if they reinforce or contradict each other
> in specific instances?
>
> Suppose someone wants to do a thesaurus search on marriage, so a
> search is done on:  wed, wedded, wedding, unwed, marriage, marry,
> matrimony, marry, married, unmarried, union etc., etc., etc.
>
> Does each search count as one "view" to be paid for?
>
> How would one go about becoming an expert, or even more, a scholar,
> of material that is released only in pay-per-view formats?
>
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> Michael S. Hart