Struggling against plunging prices and a shrinking audience, book
publishers think they’ve found a compelling vision for the future:
magazines.
Today, the San Francisco-based literary startup Plympton launched an online fiction service called Rooster.
It’s sold by subscription. It’s priced by the month. And it
automatically delivers regular content to your iPhone or iPad. In other
words, it’s a book service that looks a lot like a magazine service. And
it’s just the latest example of how books are being packaged like
magazines.
With Rooster, readers pay $5 per month in exchange for a stream of
bite-sized chunks of fiction. Each chunk takes just 15 minutes or so to
read, and over the course of a month, they add up to two books. The
service builds on the success of Plympton’s Daily Lit, which emails you classic literature in five-minute installments.
Originally,
as part of a partnership with Amazon, Plympton focused on selling its
serials one volume at a time. In other words, you’d sign up for a series
like “Hacker Mom”
for $3.99, receive each episode on your Kindle, and then be done. The
company then moved to subscriptions after co-founders Yael Goldstein
Love and Jennifer 8. Lee realized Plympton knew far more about its
readers than any traditional publisher.
Whereas an old-line book maker sells to bookstores, Plympton deals
directly with customers. It knows their email addresses and could at
least theoretically use their reading and purchase history to tailor the
content of subscription streams (though with only one subscription
channel, the company has no immediate plans to do so). Meanwhile,
production costs are significantly lower with ebooks, and distribution
is essentially free. That means more money can be plowed into online
marketing for subscription channels. So, whereas the idea of mailing a
monthly batch of books was ungainly in the old physical book market, it
has become feasible in the ebook world, feasible not just because
digital distribution is easy but because online publishers know and
build audiences better.
Rooster follows in the footsteps of the whole-book literary subscriptions offered by indie Brooklyn outfit Emily Books, the all-you-can-eat genre subscriptions offered by F + W Media, and more general subscriptions offered by the likes of Oyster and Scribd. Tim Waterstone, owner of the UK bookstore Waterstones, has also announced Read Petite, a forthcoming short-fiction streaming service.
So now that we know that it’s possible to deliver books like
magazines, to sell them like magazines, and to target them at clusters
of readers like magazines, the big question looms: Do book enthusiasts
actually want to engage with literature the way they engage with
magazines? And can they afford to? After shelling out every month for
Spotify and Netflix subscriptions, for New York Times digital,
for electronic tablet magazines, for immersive online videogames, for
online file storage, and, oh right, for high-speed internet, will people
sign up for yet another monthly charge? Will they have the intellectual
bandwidth to consume what they bought? And will they come to trust or
despise the online studios pushing books onto their phones and iPads?
Those are difficult questions to answer. But such is the world of modern book publishing.
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