Tag Archive for 'patrons vs. consumers'

Downloadable books

Published
by
Colm
on 2 April, 2008
in Books (and the like) and Writing
. 6 Comments

Maybury posted yesterday about Harper Collin’s free book experiment, in which they allowed everyone to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free online. (Not, strictly speaking, a new idea, but still.)

How did it go? Gaiman reports:

68,000 unique visitors to the book pages of American Gods

3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate

And that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%

A pretty impressive result. Wu Ming (authors of Q and the brilliant 54) have been advocates of this sort of thing for a long time now, and it’s interesting to see a major publisher dipping its toes in the pool.

I think books are the medium most likely to succeed with this kind of model – apart from the whole “owning the artifact” thing that applies to all media, I find that reading from a computer is much more tiring than reading from a book. Certainly, I never got past the first five pages of 54 until I bought it. (I may be out of the loop on this, feel free to contradict me.) If it becomes common practice it’ll be a step closer to treating people, as Jeff Tweedy put it, as patrons rather than consumers, and that’s something I find utterly delightful.

Distro’s Secret

Published
by
Colm
on 7 March, 2008
in Music and Writing
. 2 Comments

Trent Reznor’s latest wheeze, much like his previous, has been described in many quarters as “doing a Radiohead”. I don’t know, did people describe every CD release for the first few years as “doing an ABBA“?

It’s worth noting that Yorke & Co. never intended to revolutionise distribution, whereas Reznor most certainly does. The system in place for Ghosts I-IV represents a return to the drawing board after the disappointing results of the Saul Williams experiment; in other words, Reznor is committed to figuring out how to make this work. If someone with his profile can make a proper financial success of such a venture, who knows what it’ll kick-start.

Now obviously, NIN had a hefty fanbase in place before they came within shouting distance of a self-published album, and it’s true that anyone can start vomiting content onto the internet without a hope of meaningful success, but once the trails are blazed it will start to become a more and more viable route for emerging artists. Grim tidings abound, but it seems to me that should the new models be proven, the changes in the cultural landscape will be hard to predict.