From the beginning of Digital Change Thinking Time, which for me goes back to the mid-1990s, “subscription” has been high on the list of future expectations. That’s natural. The subscription model has emerged as the dominant one for cable TV (although there is still some pay-per-use) and Netflix works that way as well. Lots of people subscribe to satellite radio. Rhapsody is a successful subscription service for music. Pandora for music has a free model and a paid model, as does Spotify.
Subscriptions actually have a history in trade publishing too, where they were called “book clubs”. The print book club model, which also depended heavily on the club’s role in curation (or title selection), was doomed by the arrival of online bookselling. But O’Reilly has demonstrated the common sense (and worked out the mechanics) of a subscription model for ebooks with their wildly successful Safari program for the past several years.
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