Paying by the Page

July 2, 2014

“Pay as you go” is a service model that allows you the freedom to pay for the types of services you want to use when you want to you them. The idea is that it saves people time and money. Ola Sitarska introduces us to the concept that books can be applied to the pay as you go model in her blog post: “Experiment Results: Books In A ‘Pay As You Want’ Model.’” The book was published as part of her work at Makerland. Makerland is an open source company that teaches people how to code and use the Internet to their benefit. Their book, Makerland Tutorials, helps people understand basic Internet usage and navigate the many options to help them promote themselves.

Releasing the book as a “pay as you go” project was a complete experiment. They offered a downloadable PDF and a printed paper copy. They advertised is using regular channels: newsletter, blog post, Twitter, Reddit, and news Web sites. The PDF was more popular than the paper copy. The results for the PDF are below:

• “average book was worth $0.87

• 89 out of 490 people paid anything (18%)

• if we extract only people who paid anything, then we have average of $5 per book. median is also $5.

• the highest payment was $20, 4x paid average and 23x average. the lowest one was $0.99.

• we’ve got 4 mailinator emails (of course, they also didn’t pay)

I think this results make me happy. I know they might be better if we invest more time into promotion, but I like this two numbers: 18% of people who paid anything and almost 500 people who downloaded the book.”

For an experiment that relied on free advertising channels and with a minimal investment, the Makerland team as able to make a profit and learned how to improve the “pay as you go” book in the future. Will this be a new way people read books in the future? It is more plausible for non-fiction books than fiction, but why not? Why pay for a book that you don’t end up liking or reading?

Whitney Grace, July 02, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

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