Once again Tim O’Reilly brings wisdom and insight to the debate on price point vs. reading device for spurring on the adoption of e-books, and subscription model vs. ad driven model for generating profit from electronic books. The take-aways are:
- Lower e-book prices, not gizmos like the Amazon Kindle, will be the big spur for book sales.
- Safari Books, O’Reilly’s Online joint venture with Pearson, which delivers subscription access to thousands of computer and business books, generates more revenue than is normally reported for the entire downloadable ebook business.
- If prices fall to $5 or less, as predicted, you can equally bet that they will rise if and when the electronic format becomes dominant.
- It takes a lot of page views to generate profit from ads.
