15.04.15 www.thebookseller.com


FEATURE SUBSCRIPTIONS: THE FUTURE?


15 The subscript


Agent Meg Davis makes the case against subscription services, arguing that handing over users’ data and relinquishing branding will only aid monopolisation


having pirated books on its service (although it is doing what it can to eliminate them). To be fair, let’s look at the positive arguments for subscription models:


 Some readers pay more for their subscription than for single-book purchases;


 Some books may be more “discoverable”;  It is one way to respond to the new digital world of high-volume, low-value transactions (which are cheaper if they can be automated).


But here’s the bad news, which my fellow Association of Authors’ Agents committee members are concerned about:


 If there is a “capped pot” (the money available to authors cannot exceed revenue generated by subscriptions), it works only in favour of the subscription company: however popular the content, there is a limit to what the publisher will receive;


 Information is opaque: the publisher is not told what the sales figures are or who the users are;


 Some books need to be more expensive to be viable (e.g. academic and niche): the ”one size fits all” approach threatens these;


 It undermines our branding.


pan to fire. We’ve seen the music, film and TV industries travel in the same direction. It’s not often that the books and pornography industries are grouped together, but the latter shows us what can happen to content when one monopolistic subscription service grabs most of the market. Though porn is big business—around $97bn was generated globally by “adult entertainment” in 2014, according to Kassia Wosick, a professor of sociology at New Mexico State University who studies the porn industry—and arguably more prominent in wider society than ever before, payment to its creators has dropped through the floor in recent years. Most commentators put the blame on subscription site


I


MindGeek, which owns the bulk of the most popular YouTube- esque porn channels (the company itself says its traffic makes it one of the top five consumers of bandwidth in the world). MindGeek has become so powerful that its remaining rivals are in effect forced to allow it to use their content, for fear of being blacklisted or having their material marginalised. The difficulty, say critics such as the “alt-porn” star and Vice columnist Stoya, is that MindGeek also pirates its own material in order to keep the value of the content low—and therefore the payments it needs to make to its suppliers, too. You may think that porn to books is a leap. But there are publishers doing business with Scribd, which has admitted to


f publishers are experimenting with subscription models as a way to broaden the market and lessen the dependence on Amazon, this is a quick route from frying


Pictured: streaming


services such as Netflix have created a new


economy, with many “traditional” content creators bypassed


Not being given proper sales information not only undermines publishers’ (and authors’) bargaining power, but their ability to maximise sales in successful markets and formats. It hands over control to the subscription companies. We support a market that rewards success. If a book is good, it should bring financial success to its author and publisher. It also brings valuable information to us regarding trends in readers’ tastes; a book that performs unexpectedly well opens up possibilities for other authors and publishers, which in turn develops our industry and enhances our culture. What is the point of publishers developing their brands if


we allow readers to go to one aggregator? There are plenty of people who think (vaguely) that Foyles publishes its own stock, and that all TV programmes are produced by the BBC. There is little reason for readers not to think that if, say,


Meg Davis is an agent at the Ki Agency and is on the executive committee of the Association of Authors’ Agents


Amazon is the only place they buy books, that it is the prevailing brand. Any sense of quality that they might have of a book published by Faber or Headline, or written by Bernard Cornwell, is erased. In the music, film and TV industries, where subscription companies already have a good hold, we can see how revenue to content owners and producers is being eroded. There is a case to make that this goes against the European Commission legislation that is meant to ensure content creators receive equitable remuneration. Under the models they currently offer, it’s better not to do business with subscription services in the first place. The internet is not the democratising place we thought it would be. It has unleased a bewildering torrent of content and any company that helps make sense of it all for us is attractive. Unfortunately, this has enabled some companies to become monopolistic, with frighteningly destructive implications. 


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32