S Martin via Flickr
Today, nearly everything is available on subscription. The subscription model entails selling a product or service for a recurring price. Depending on the company and product, the bill can be paid every month, every year, or some other interval.
The book industry used a somewhat different subscription model beginning in the 17th century, where authors could raise the money to print their books before publication. It amounted to an early version of crowdsourcing.
Selling e-books requires a different business model than selling printed books. The publisher has one master copy of the book, which it makes available to customers’ e-readers. When they sell to libraries, they have imposed a new subscription model that essentially rips off libraries and, in the case of public libraries, tax payers. Where did it come from and what are libraries doing about it?
The early history of the subscription model
After Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press made it possible to mass produce books, Venetian printers started to print pamphlets with news of current events. They sold copies to ship captains, who sold them at other ports and thus made printing into an international business.
At first, taverns bought them and hired people to read them out loud to their patrons, most of whom were illiterate. As more and more middle- and working-class people learned to read, they bought news sheets themselves.
German printer Johann Carolus invented the weekly newspaper, Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien in 1604. It made current information on a variety of topics available every week to anyone willing to buy a subscription. This paper marks a convenient place to begin the history of the subscription business model.
The book industry grew by leaps and bounds. At first, authors relied on patronage by wealthy people to finance their work. As the middle class grew in size and affluence, a new audience for books started to grow with it. However, publishers lacked the capitalization to sell to this audience.
Therefore, they turned to a subscription model to receive advance funding. A prospective author would bear responsibility for fund-raising by finding people willing to advance half the price of the book. When the publisher had received enough money, it would publish the book and the subscribers would pay the other half.
The book would appear with the names of the more prominent subscribers printed in the front of the book, with the ones at the highest end of the social scale appearing at the top. The names of princes, dukes, and other nobles at the top of the subscriber lists helped sell the book to non-subscribers.
Some early examples of books sold by subscription
Frontispiece and title page of a tiny children’s book published by Thomas Boreman in 1741. The list of subscribers includes children.
It was especially difficult to finance books with extensive illustrations more complicated than simple woodcuts. These books required the work of an illustrator and then an engraver. The illustrations could not be printed on the same press as the text. The first illustrated edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost (4th edition, 1668) includes a list of more than 500 subscribers.
When Maria Sibylla Merian sought subscribers for her Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensiuym(1705), she promised a discount. They would pay 15 Dutch guilders for their copies; anyone who bought it after publication would have to pay 18 guilders.
Finding subscribers could be a long and cumbersome process. The author would approach people he knew and ask them not only to subscribe but also ask their friends and acquaintances to subscribe. Alexander Pope published his translation of The Iliad in 1720, seven years after he started seeking subscribers.
This subscription model also worked well for printed music. The composer C.P.E. Bach, for example, published and sold 15 collections of music by subscription. He took out advertisements in newspapers to attract subscribers. He also hired “collectors” in many different cites to solicit subscriptions. Most of his subscribers lived in Germany, but he obtained others in such important musical centers as London, Vienna, and Prague, and as distant as Moscow.
Eventually, however, publishers began to serve as gatekeepers, with acquisitions editors who decided which titles to publish and which to decline. The subscription model began to seem old-fashioned and publishers started to turn away from it.
The return of subscriptions to the book industry
The Book of the Month Club, founded in 1926, adopted a subscription model that more nearly resembles a newspaper or magazine subscription. The company selects one title every month and sends it to its subscribers.
As the internet and online news sources became more and more successful, print media started to lose ground. The New York Times decided to offer a digital subscription that debuted in March 2011. It became very successful and many other periodicals adopted the subscription model, including some online-only publications such as some of the content on Medium.
Some publishers’ sites offer a limited number of free articles. Others exist entirely behind a paywall.
Other products available by subscription
When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, no one was interested in it as a physical object. Without the ability to make and receive calls, a phone is nothing more than an expensive and unattractive paperweight.
The first switchboard and the first telephone exchange existed by 1878, and by the start of the next decade, tens of thousands of telephones were in use. Customers paid for telephone service by subscription.
Nowadays, consumers can choose among any number of streaming services for music and videos. It is no longer necessary to purchase physical recordings. It is also no longer necessary to purchase software, and then have to choose which upgrades to get. For example, Microsoft Office 365 offers a package of applications by subscription, and subscribers get the latest updates automatically.
Season tickets to sporting events or other entertainment amount to subscriptions. Leasing a car instead of buying it amounts to a subscription. It is also possible to subscribe to prepared meals and all manner of personal goods and services.
Subscription services now make up such a large part of the economy that several companies exist primarily to provide the framework for them. We can choose subscriptions for experiences (such as travel), physical products, or digital products.
The advantages of the subscription model for businesses are obvious: subscribers have more brand loyalty and provide a steadier income stream than transactional customers. It offers customers convenience, cost savings, and a more personalized customer experience. Of course, not all consumers enjoy their subscriptions. Put “how to cancel” in a search engine, and it will offer to complete the query with multiple subscription services.
The difference between physical books and e-books
Perfecto Capucine from Pixabay
Anyone can buy a printed book and then do whatever they want with it. They can keep it as long as they want. They can sell it if they want. Once publishers sell copies of printed books, they no longer have any interest in them (in the legal sense of interest). Legally, the sale of books, movies, sound recordings, and other physical copyrighted items is governed by the “first sale” principle.
E-books are different. Publishers create one master copy. The books you have on your Kindle or other e-readers are new copies of that master copy. All we really buy is a license to have a copy on a device we own. The same principle applies to digital versions audio or video files.
If you buy an e-book, you can put it on more than one e-reader. I have the Kindle app on two computers and a tablet. Installing it on all three readers means, essentially, that I have bought three virtual copies.
The alternative is absurd. In theory, it ought to be possible to sell individual copies, just as it is possible to buy digital music files on CD. But wouldn’t that mean that each electronic copy of a book would have to be loaded separately on some machine?
One of the big advantages of the Kindle and its competitors is to make multiple titles available on a single, easily portable device. It’s the same reason why streaming services have replaced movie rentals.
Here’s another difference: if you want to lend an e-book you have bought to someone else, you can’t do it through your app. If you use a Kindle, you have to go through Amazon, and publishers can forbid Amazon to allow lending or some or all of their titles.
A subscription service imposed on libraries
Library circulation desk / Newburyport Public Library via Flickr
For libraries, e-books are even more complicated. The library puts a copy on an e-book reader that it lends to a patron. After the end of the loan period, that copy simply disappears from the e-reader. Although logic would indicate that the demise of that copy has the same effect as a patron returning a physical copy, publishers don’t see it that way. They assert, contrary to actual experience, that libraries hurt publishers’ revenue.
Publishers charge libraries more than twice as much as the retail price consumers pay. Then, instead of granting the license in perpetuity, they limit the length of time the library has access to a title and/or the number of times it can lend a title. For best-sellers, that restriction forces libraries to put patrons on a long waiting list before they can borrow a digital copy. Very often, publishers allow a license of only two years. After that, the library has to pay to renew access to it.
Libraries can’t afford to replace all of the titles that expire. That expense would exceed the total budget of many libraries, meaning, of course, that they would not be able to buy any new titles either digitally or in print. As the librarian at the West Haven Public Library in Connecticut puts it, “Imagine if a playground was built at a school with tax dollars, only to be taken down after two years of use.”
As it is, deciding which expired titles to renew takes away from the process of deciding which new titles to purchase. And that process has been largely automated. Reviewing expired titles is a tedious manual process. Publishers of e-books have made collection development nearly impossible and cheated taxpayers in the process.
Libraries seek relief
Librarians have lately advocated for state legislation to ease restrictions on electronic material. Whatever legislation has passed and not been vetoed by the governor has not fared well in courts. Publishers have successfully argued that copyright is a federal matter and states have no constitutional authority to regulate publishers.
It would appear, then, that relief will either have to come from Congress or, possibly more likely, federal courts. The “first sale” doctrine came about as a result of a 1908 court order, where the judge decided against publishers’ interpretation of copyright law.
Sources:
The crowd-funded book: an eighteenth-century revival / Norma Clarke, History Workshop. June 12, 2018
History of the printed newspaper / PsPrint
Libraries struggle to afford the demand for e-books and seek new state laws in fight with publishers / Susan Haigh, Associated Press. March 12, 2024
The origin of the subscription model / Dana Dunne, Forbes. December 3, 2021
Subscriptions, dedications, and patrons / Dumbarton Oaks
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