Ari,
In any freemium business (which is, in essence, what I am proposing) there is a basic service provided for free and a set of premium services for payment. One of the keys to a successful freemium business is a constant shuffling
of the line between what is provided for free and what is paid for because a premium service today could become commoditised and become a basic service tomorrow - at the same time, technological advances create opportunities for new premium services which
allows the basic-premium line to be re-drawn.
I am proposing a baseline where the basic service is an ability to read the content, online, free of charge. Without this baseline, access is not 'open'. But it is a baseline that could edge forward, provided sufficient income is
coming from premium services (which, we have to understand, must cover the cost of providing the free service too).
So, to answer your question, with a read-only baseline, premium services could include the ability to cut'n'paste, to print, to save for offline reading. I'd rather not specify the type of format that would provide these services,
that is for the publisher to decide and there is no easy answer (it is technically possible, for example, to offer a read-only PDF file). In our case, we create a read-only file using HTML and offer PDF, e-Pub, .csv and excel file formats for our premium editions.
As to who would need premium services - well, anyone who needs to do more than simply read content. I would hazard that there is a sizeable audience for doing more than simply reading online: in our case, we've found that 15% of
all accesses to our content is to premium versions. This might sound small, but since we launched our free, read-only service in 2012, the total number of accesses to what are now premium versions is larger than the total number of accesses we had before.
So we've succeeded in reaching a much, much larger audience and have sufficient demand for premium editions to keep the books balanced.
Hope this helps.
Toby
Toby Green
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate
OECD
Winner The Academic and Professional Publisher Award
2017
From: Ari Belenkiy <
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Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2017 11:20:21 -0700
Toby,
May I ask what the "premium version" is? Just easier to read? A PDF file?
And could you give an example of who might need it and why?
Ari Belenkiy
Vancouver BC
Canada