In the Digital Age of publishing business models have to be looked at again and changed to fit an ever changing market.

There are a few different Digital Business Models that can be used like: Pay Per Chapter, subscription, crowd funded, Open access, Pay wall, Freemium etc. Some of these models can be beneficial to the customer but others can be terrible for your average consumer. For example Pay Wall which allows people to look at some content on the website until they hit a wall, ‘the pay wall’, and then they have to pay. This can be seen as bad as if you are a casual consumer it can hinder you and make you leave the website, for example if a university student is looking up papers and sources and finds a journal that might be useful they can’t read enough of it to see if it will be worth their time to pay past the ‘paywall’. This kind of system can just make people leave the website and avoid it in the future. This is the opposite with the Advertising business model which lets you see the whole site for free but has adverts on the side of the site which generates the sites money/revenue (KPMG, 2009).

A popular opinion is that the ‘Subscription’ model is one of, if not the best business model for publishers to use (Webb, 2012).One of main reasons for this is the fact that it is good for both the publishers and consumers if done properly. People in the Digital Age are used to services which use the subscription model with services like Netflix and Cruncyroll which stream TV and Movies, this means consumers are satisfied and used to a monthly subscription as long as they believe the price is worth the content, which means that these kind of sites need a large back catalogue to make it worth it. And it’s good for publishers as it provides them a monthly sum for the content they are providing, meaning they are assured money for their products (Publishing Technology 2013).   

Another common business model is ‘Donations’, this model is mostly used by self-publishers or cult followed books as it uses the fan base of the series or the author to pay for the book to be made. For example the site ‘Pateron’ which uses the donation method to pay its creators once a month to produce the content they are offering. Another is the site ‘Kickstarter’ that has a one off payment not monthly. These sites have one main problem, which is that if the creator does not produce the content they promised the money donated is not refundable.

To conclude some of the new business models are great and others can be useful but can have problems for both the consumer and the publisher.   

 

 

Publishing Technology. (2013). Why business models matter for ebook subscription services
Available at: http://www.publishingtechnology.com/2013/09/netflix-for-books/ Accessed on: 23/11/14

Webb, J. (2012). Business Models to Monetize Publishing in the Digital era.
Available at: http://toc.oreilly.com/2012/02/monetization-in-publishing-toc-2012.html Accessed on: 23/11/14

KPMG, (2009). Emerging Business Models to Help Serve Tomorrow’s Digital Tribes.

In the digital age getting children interested in reading books has become a harder task, I will look at how publishers are dealing with this and what they need to do to get kids to read.

In the UK market people spent 187.9 million on books so far in 2014 just on children books, this is 10% on the same period in 2013, however the total market is down 8% (Timbrell 2014). This could show that children are not reading as much as they used too, this is most likely because of new media’s taking up time that children used to use reading. According to a survey of 2000 British children and parents in 2013, 50% of families have at least one tablet, which is an increase of 24% in 2012. Most children are still classed as heavy or medium readers, but there has been a large rise to occasional or non-readers. This has been linked to the new Medias which have come to take up free time with 53% of children spending their free time on things such as: social networking, YouTube, and mobile games and apps.

Some publishers have tried to combat children spending time online and not in books by bringing the books online. JellyPie is a website and division of Egmont the publishing company. This site includes games and interactive media to advertise the books that are made by the company. Similar things have been tried for apps with apps like PopJam, which does a similar job.(Timbrell 2014).

A lot of parents still regard the internet as this dangerous jungle where everything is trying to go after their kids, one author with her book is trying to break this stereotype (Tyzack 2014). The internet can be a powerful tool when it comes to helping children read, if you know how to use it. With the use of gamification, like seen in the JellyPie website I mentioned earlier and sites like Pottermore; which is a Harry Potter fan site which uses writing and reading as objectives for fans of the franchise to engage in. This kind of gamification convinces kids that by reading more and writing more they achieve small achievements, which has been proven to keep children to read more.

In conclusion, yes children are reading less and less but some of the time that they are spending not reading is often put into other media which either is linked to reading in some way, be it an app or a website, or something that is beneficial to their development.     

      


Dredge, S. (2013) Children’s reading shrinking due to apps, games and YouTube.
Available at:http://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/sep/26/children-reading-less-apps-games
Accessed on: 23/11/14

Children’s Publishing in the Digital Age [Lecture] Oxford Brookes University, Nicola Timbrell, (2014). Accessed on: 23/11/14.

 

Tyzack, Anna. (2014) Learning the Law of the Digital Jungle.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationadvice/10638613/Learning-the-law-of-the-digital-jungle.html Accessed on 23/11/14

Google Glass: the future of wearable technology, or an experiment that should be put to rest in favour of something else? Google Glasses are a wearable eyepiece technology that covers both eyes and gives you a HUD (heads up display) in the corner of your vision, which shows information such as location, altitude, and even maps of your location. Some herald the glasses as the next step in our technological evolution, others say that it is just hype. The truth is most likely somewhere in between. With the hefty price point of $1500 for just a beta version (Swider, 2014) it is hardly the widely available everyday product that Google want it to be. Users are being ridiculed for wearing them in public, due to the pretentious look of the glasses, and the snobbery that tends to come with the people who wear them and the fact that when wearing the glasses you can browse your emails and texts without needing to get out your mobile phone, leading to people not wanting to talk to users with them on as they don’t have their full attention (Dvorak, 2014)      On the other hand Google Glass, if it overcomes its negative image could be the gateway to a whole array of programs and plugins to help speed up the way our world works. For example the introduction of the Word Press plugin in 2013 allows big organisations and your everyday blogger to post blogs, photos and videos across the Glass platform. The plugin uses the open source code, which is given by word press, much in the same way Facebook and Twitter have used the code (Kelly, 2013). If more companies capitalise on this Google Glass and products like it could become a big part of, not everyday life, but business life and could have a lot of useful capabilities. For example if it is used in conjunction with clickable paper or QR codes Google Glass could be the next step in digesting information in the modern world. (Rudman 2014) However none of this will happen if Google do indeed pull the plug on the Google Glass program as some critics suggest (Dvorak, 2014). Even though critics might say that no one will want to wear them, and there has been evidence that no one will anymore; for example there was an incident where someone got their Google Glasses ripped off their face due to the rumour/worry that everything seen by them would be recorded and uploaded to the Google database, but some fanatics still exist. When one anonymous beta tester put his $1500 Glass up for auction within a day it had risen in price to $16,000 before Ebay stopped the bidding due to lack of proof that the seller had the Glasses (Arthur 2013). This shows that even with the lack of critique review there will be a small minority who will buy them whatever, this may grow into there being some use for the Glass and the plugins and for it to be used in the publishing world.


Arthur, C (2014). Google Glass v Apple Watch: in form against function, Apple edges it over Google. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/12/google-glass-apple-watch-technology-design   (Accessed: 12 October 2014)   

Arthur, C (2013). Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy?  Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/06/google-glass-threat-to-our-privacy (Accessed: 12 October 2014)

Dvorak, J (2014). Rest in Peace, Google Glass: 2012-2014. Available at: http://uk.pcmag.com/wearable-tech/36416/opinion/rest-in-peace-google-glass-2012-2014 (Accessed: 12 October 2014)

Kelly, S (2013). Eye Publishing: Google Glass Gets WordPress Plugin.
Available at: http://mashable.com/2013/12/09/google-glass-wordpress/ (Accessed: 12 October 2014)  

Nerney, C (2013). Looking past the Google Glass hype: Nobody knows what it's for.
Available at: http://www.citeworld.com/article/2114331/mobile-byod/google-glass-hype.html  (Accessed: 12 October 2014)   

Rudman, H (2014). Through the Digital Glass. Available at: http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/271/case-study/through-digital-glass (Accessed: 12 October 2014)

Swider, M (2014). Google Glass Review. Available at: http://www.techradar.com/reviews/gadgets/google-glass-1152283/review (Accessed: 12 October 2014)