Today I'll share with you a recipe, for those interested in the ebook business.
While the digital artifacts penetrate our lives, more and more people wish to make a more complete experience of the digital ecology.
In times of crisis like this, their usual habit is to search for discounts and/or buy used items. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do it with ebooks too? You can make people enjoy a full consumerist experience, and lock them in your nice walled garden to establish a dominion over the market. How? Follow these steps.
Step #1 Ebooks bound to your own ebook reader.
Sell ebooks on your online store, but make them readable only via your own ebook reader / software (like Amazon with its Kindle). Associate every ebook with a unique customer ID, so that anyone who wish to read it, must first be allowed to do so.
Step #2 The special ingredient.
Now allow people to 'sell'* their 'used' ebooks (uniquely) via your own online store. The seller will transfer his right (license) to read ebook X, to a buyer who'll pay to associate X's license with his own customer ID.
The seller gains store credit, not real money. The buyer pays a (not much**) lower price, but your store will charge every transaction with a fee, and will share a part of this income with the original ebook producer.
As a result, more people will buy on your store, because they'll find ebooks exaclty like new, at lower prices, but these ebooks can only be read within your own ebook reader and softwares.
No need to say that an armoured DRM protection system is needed, but that's not a big trouble when people are using your own ebook readers. Thanks to this, you have a firm control over hardware and software used to read the ebook.
Step #3 Lock them in.
If you've got this accomplished, you'll find your company in a very strong position over the competitors, because lots of people will buy your ebook readers to buy with lower prices. Sellers will use the gained store credit to buy more ebooks, so your business will grow very fast: because poor people have less money but they are a lot.
Now invest a part of the income to make sure that every school from primary to high will use your ebook readers. Sell ereaders to schools at the lowest price possible, you don't even need to make a direct profit out of this. You want people to use the name of your devices as synonym for 'book', colonize their common sense by educating the youth.
Now use all your power to lock people in, following the example of uncle Bill.
*the brackets are because people don't actually own the ebooks they buy, at present, but they're kinda renting a limited license
**you can always have control of the 'used' prices
No comments:
Post a Comment