The second thought is really a looking-at-it-backwards inversion of one Martyn’s comments in his blog post Create Digital First:
…we are the start of a digital consumer offer but it is…based on yesterday’s physical cost model, processes and perceptions. Merely taking the finished book and generating a digital rendition that mirrors the physical one is what music did with CDs. Is it logical to merely replicate the book and create just another rendition? We don’t envisage the same demand change as music experienced in selling just fragments (tracks), but it is possible to see the selling of instalments or part works, where all the complete ‘book’ may not be bought.
Or looking at this another way, couldn’t the book be the fragment? I wrote a little while ago about the idea of extensibility, that books could be surrounded by, in William Gibson’s words, a ‘quasi-spectral hypertext’ that extends the frame of the text beyond the information contained only on the page. This is the kind of thing Harlequin are beginning to explore with their Enriched Editions.
So if consumers are open to new pricing models and new ways of configuring book content, especially fragments and parts of works, doesn’t it also stand to reason that the basic text of a book could be the fragment, and consumers pay a premium for enriched versions that have value-adds? This would bring it more into line with the DVD retail model of included special extras in limited editions. It would also help publishers to differentiate between general retail audiences and niche fan audiences.
Kate Eltham is a writer and creative industries professional based in Brisbane, Australia. She is Chief Executive Officer of 
kate.eltham {at} gmail.com
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
3 Comments in Response to Kate Eltham #2
When I hear mention of monetizing parts of books, I often wonder if the perceived value of the content (by a reader) can survive the work’s disembowelment. In those cases where I want a piece of information from a book, I find the internet is a good substitute source. Otherwise I look to a book for a thesis, a vision, or a perspective that is missed upon a singular investigation of one of its parts. I think selling parts of books misses the point of why people turn to them in the first place.
That said, I do like your idea of giving the .txt away and selling the extras. I would love to be able to get a text file for free and then pay an incremental fee for the same words in audio and in book form.
It’s a good point Mark. Because I’m a fiction writer I tend to filter a lot of my thoughts about publishing models through the framework of narrative. Even from this perspective I think book content has a lot to gain from being “unpackaged” (Disembowelment seems such a dramatic term! *g*) If a reader is looking for a traditional reading experience, starting at page 1 and reading until “the end” then yes, the perceived value might be endangered, but there may be a higher perceived value from readers who are looking for a rich, multi-platform experience. The beautify of it is that we can explore a proliferation of ways to deliver book content, including the traditional one, to match the proliferation of experiences readers are looking for.
As for distributing text free and selling the extras, that wasn’t quite what I was proposing, but this is a good feemium model anyway and would probably work really well in markets where high-end users will happily pay for the deluxe edition, either “True Fans” as described by Kevin Kelly, or education/professional users.
What I was describing, rather, was a traditional book as the basic model, and the “extras” version more like text with embedded hyperlinks that extends the content to create a “knowledge footprint” that is larger and deeper than just the text itself, and likely would also be dynamically affected by user participation.
Hi Kate — excellent counter points. Thanks for taking the time.
The “knowledge footprint” idea is particularly interesting.
There is a challenge there somewhere about monetizing the “extras”.
That typically is hard to do, but I will have to think more about it.
Best,
mb
Indeed! And I can only theorise about it, I haven’t attempted to achieve it. Just after I wrote that I comment I came across Cory Doctorow’s recent column about Macropayments:
http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/09/cory-doctorow-macropayments.html
Will blog it presently but thought it was relevant to our conversation.
Best wishes,
K.