Which Cloud-based Subscription Model Works Best for Ebooks? Consumer Driven Models From the Text Book Industry. Is an A La Carte E-Book Subscription Model Viable? A budget for Babel. The subscription model for ebooks hasn't emerged yet, but it will. From the beginning of Digital Change Thinking Time, which for me goes back to the mid-1990s, “subscription” has been high on the list of future expectations. That’s natural. The subscription model has emerged as the dominant one for cable TV (although there is still some pay-per-use) and Netflix works that way as well. Lots of people subscribe to satellite radio. Rhapsody is a successful subscription service for music.
Pandora for music has a free model and a paid model, as does Spotify. Subscriptions actually have a history in trade publishing too, where they were called “book clubs”. The print book club model, which also depended heavily on the club’s role in curation (or title selection), was doomed by the arrival of online bookselling. In the past week, Publishing Perspectives offered up a thoughtful piece by Javier Celaya speculating on a free subscription, ad-supported model for ebooks like Spotify is for the music business. Neither of those is what I have in mind.