Random House: Digital Is Our Destiny

Business Week Says Random House is moving beyond print to protect itself from the likes of Google.
Unwilling to let a Google, Yahoo! , or Microsoft dictate terms in cyberspace, Random House Inc., the world’s largest trade publisher, is taking the industry lead. In early November it outlined ways it would begin to offer its books directly to consumers on a page-per-view basis. Random House will get at least 4 cents a page and split that roughly in half with authors for fiction and narrative nonfiction titles. Other types of books, such as cookbooks, will have different pricing models. Random House is discouraging copying of the texts by delivering pages in low-resolution files.

November 22, 2005 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. Lis says:
    November 22, 2005 at 10:33 pm

    Intelligent digital publishing from a major…
    …publisher?

    Is that allowed?

    At $0.04 a page, that would be $14 for an entire 350-page book. It’s low enough for people to sample seriously to see if they’re interested; not so low that it’s likely to make them feel that they can’t now afford a print copy of books that they find they really want.

    And if the pricing for cookbooks etc. is reasonable–gee, imagine being able to buy the recipes you want, rather than buying whole books when you want three or four recipes in them. Maybe Random House has finally noticed what lesser publishing houses as different as Baen and National Academy Press have been saying for years: making books available electronically whets people’s appetite for the real (print) thing, rather than suppressing the market.

    Reply
  2. Anonymous Patron says:
    November 23, 2005 at 8:26 am

    Man…
    I’m picking my 350pg books up for $.10-$4 used… And digital .pdfs and stuff, for next to nothing.

    — Ender, Duke_of_URL

    Reply

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