The business of selling subscriptions has changed. Fifty years ago, the ‘mousetrap’ model of subscription-selling ruled. There are two parts to this commercial strategy: first you must have a fantastic product, a piece of cheese which smells terrific and which appeals to all the mice; second you need to have a well designed and secure cage — and for consumer magazines, quarterly direct debit payments and a continuous flow of new issues, fitted the bill. Once the first piece of … Keep Reading
Category: Publisher Page 10 of 41
Interesting post from Tim O’Reilly. I have not counted how many different ways they can now sell or package rights in their books. But there must be at least a dozen e-commerce options, apart from the obvious one of buying the book as a physical object.
Every chapter costs $3.99, which buys you a PDF. If you were thinking of getting started with Ruby on Rails…..
There is a strong case for Open Access to scientific research and scholarship published in article form. This was crystalised in the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001. Scientific and scholarly research publications benefit from being openly accessible, because the value of the underlying research is enhanced when it is made freely, easily, accessible to other researchers. If scientific research is to be effective it needs to be cited and referenced; it is clear that open web-based publication makes it … Keep Reading
We have compelling evidence from usage statistics: usage of a magazine’s trial issues drives subscriptions. It certainly does. Interestingly, the different magazines have different conversion rates: for some magazines the conversion rate may be as low as 1 new subscriber gained for every 50 sample pages viewed in the shop, and for others the average can be 100s of pages freely viewed for each new sub. The highly pictorial magazines are highly sampled. I think this is a very positive … Keep Reading
The Catholic Herald, the leading Catholic weekly newspaper, joins Exact Editions today as the 45th title in our shop. It is a full broadsheet and has an archive approaching 250 issues. For the first six weeks the publisher is offering free access to the whole archive, for all-comers. So there are plenty of things on which you can do research. We usually pick out a few nuggets, so here are some items that caught my attention in a brief … Keep Reading