HarperCollins is going to post free books on the web:
Starting Monday, readers who log on to www.harpercollins.com will be able to see the entire contents of “The Witch of Portobello” by Mr. Coelho; “Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy” by Mr. Irvine; “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants” by Roger Director; “The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose” by Mark Halperin; and “Warriors: Into the Wild” the first volume in a children’s series by Erin Hunter.
Random House is going to start selling books by the chapter. Leading off with Made to Stick at $2.99 a chapter.
I am a bit skeptical of the "by the chapter" business model, but books have tens or hundreds of thousands of words in them, backed by a trusted brand with editorial control, which can rank in organic search results AND be promoted through a vertical book search. Once they get a taste of the ad revenues, book publishers are going to publish most traditional nonfiction books online in their entirety, which will create a lot of competition for traditional web publishing based businesses.
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How many times have you bought a book and read the first chapter, only to decide that it's not as good as you hoped? I imagine they'll sell a lot of first chapters.
I don't think this will please a lot of readers, either. Why make multiple purchases when each chapter takes maybe only half an hour to read?
I am sorta like a machine when I start reading books. Once I start it I have to finish it. :)
There are very few books that I start and do not finish. But I am probably an anomaly.
Totally agree that few people are going to want to purchase a chapter an hour. Just giving away the first chapter free as a teaser is a better strategy, IMHO.
Plus, at $3 a chapter Made to Stick comes out to $21 for ebook by the chapter version, whereas the Kindle version is $9.99 and the hard copy version of it is $16.47 at Amazon.
I've always thought that the serialization of content (like what Stephen King did with one of his stories a several years back) could work both as a revenue model (like what you are describing above) and as an ad-supported model (in certain verticals).
The problem with books is perceived value. Their current low price point and format make serialization hard to be a value add strategy, though I think they could make a killing with ads if books were designed to fit that model.
Yup...just like media companies creating special sponsored editorial content for advertisers, many more books will cover high paying keywords, with titles like:
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