Yesterday Jon Bischke offered a new business model for content publishers on his personal blog. It’s about creating new services like better filtering, personalisation etc. The last sentences were:
Humor us content producers. Start the revolution this time rather than being a victim of it.
This is a good read, as always so you should check it out.
Today the NYT published and article about Cengage Learning, one of the America’s largest textbook publishers. They came up with a quite revolutionary idea.
Cengage Learning is now renting their textbooks to students at 40% to 70% of the sale price.
Students who choose Cengage’s rental option will get immediate access to the first chapter of the book electronically, in e-book format, and will have a choice of shipping options for the printed book. When the rental term — 60, 90 or 130 days — is over, students can either return the textbook or buy it.
This is not very new at the first look because there are already services like Chegg and BookRenter who rent books but Cengage is the first publisher who does this. And being a publisher renting books has another positive effect.
Besides giving students a new option, rentals give both publishers and textbook authors the possiblity to continue earning money from their books after the first sale, something they do not get from the sale of used textbooks.
“Our authors will get royalties on second and third rentals, just as they would on a first sale,” said Ronald G. Dunn, president and chief executive of Cengage, formerly Thomson Learning. “There’s a tremendous amount of activity around rentals now, but we’re the first higher-education publisher to move in this direction.”
The thing I would like to know is: How robust are those textbooks that they can be rented several times before being sold as second hand and will they cost the same in the second or third rental? We also shouldn’t forget that from the publisher’s side it’s a way to make money with these “traditional” textbooks before more and books will be available online only. On the other hand one shouldn’t neglet the fact that it is a good way to save the student some money in an otherwise costly educational system as well as offering the author second and third royalties. As always, the medal has two sides.
Click here, to read the full article.
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