Online Pricing Twist
October 28, 2009
When I read something, I remember chunks of the information. I don’t think too much about how my memory works. I know that in high school, I would look at a test question, have zero idea of the answer, and then I would recall what I read. Weird. Even today I can dredge up chunks of information about Nero’s alleged murder of his mom and the bits of junk floating inside a paramecium. Saved my bacon lots of times. For me, the idea of “renting” information is peculiar. Once I read it or “see”, I have it.
What caused me to think of this mental quirk was the article “.” You can read about this information service at http://www.deepdyve.com. The idea, as I understand it, is:
DeepDyve’s new online rental service builds on our initial research platform. Using DeepDyve you can access a wide selection of more than 30 million articles from thousands of journals, all in one place. As of today you can read the full-text of many journal articles for as little as $0.99, or join a monthly plan and enjoy greater discounts and increased flexibility. Renting the articles is easy. All you need is a PayPal account. DeepDyve also has plenty of robust research tools and personalized recommendations that are there to foster your discovery of the science, technical and medical topics that interest you.
The business model is not dissimilar from that offered by Ebsco, one of the giants in the field of aggregated information, or Highbeam, among others. The twist is the notion of a “rental”. Renting in my mind applies to automobiles, apartments, and sidewalk edgers.
My concern with online business models is that most of them are not really new. Google emulated the third party payer model, which is different from the method of most commercial information companies. LexisNexis wants me to pay, and I won’t do that any more. Is DeepDyve breaking new ground or doing some clever marketing? The good news is that the company is making an effort to differentiate itself. When I read something – rental, fee, or just browsing in an airport newsstand – I capture the information which makes monetizing my behaviors more difficult.
Stephen Arnold, October 28, 2009
i wish I had been paid. I would have settled for a donut.
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One Response to “Online Pricing Twist”
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The 99 cents apparently allows you only to “read” the article in the DeepDyve viewer but it “cannot be downloaded, printed or shared”. Can you photograph it with your cellphone camera, transfer it to your pc and OCR it? I guess you don’t need to if you remember what you’ve read. I wonder if Google has the capability to automate a synopsis without plagiarism of say a book scan, or a specified part of a book, and/or provide the sources used or links to ideas covered without using any copyrighted material. It would come with a disclaimer and suggest buying the book – or relevant chapter, if possible – to understand the author’s contribution, as distinct from the kind of content the author is concerned with.