Ebook Pricing

I'm not a big fan of pay as you go, since it means another periodic thing I have to go do to read the story and in addition I have to pay money for each bit. And decide, over and over and over again, whether to pay for the next bit. I hate deciding.

...there's really no upside. I've seen a couple authors try it and it made me not buy their book. :/ Maybe I'll get it if they finish it and release it in one piece, although the total cost of all the chapters is pretty pricey at that point.

Sounds like they never heard of Crowd-Funding!

I think the key would be, how 'painless' is each tiny payment. We can run up a lot of connect time in various places (eg cell phone per minute charges) because it's passive and painless, it's automatically added to a monthly bill.

If just passively reading along is all it takes, then as long as the book is interesting enough to keep you from opting out, the author is earning her payment.

The only idea over at http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130204/10563521877/next-ebook-evolution%20-pay-as-you-re%20ad-ebooks.shtml which fits this model is the 'put up a chunk of money in advance to buy whatever time/pages you wander through', like a pre-paid cell phone account. That would operate painlessly, but it would need to start out with a lot of obviously desirable material or perks to get me, for instance, to put up the chunk.

Hm, there could also be a factor like, "This book needs to earn $X a month. If you are the only reader, each page will deduct 10-cents from your account. But if there are 10 readers, each page will only cost each of you 1-cent. If you can recruit 100 readers, each page will cost each of you .001-cent. The more you publicize the book, the cheaper it will get!"

I prefer the free sample model. If you read my first chapter and want the rest, buy the book. Don't parcel out my payment in dribs and rabs. I get enough of that already.

I am not a fan of the seriel model (I don't even like it for TV shows).

That'd be an interesting model for selling some other products, like video games.

Or something like Tarot or Iching readings, which I made very good money on for a coupld of months in the 1980s. I wrote a version of the classic Tarot deck and a simple program to let the viewer keep drawing cards till they added up to an answer for her. This was used as a feature in a sort of proto-internet big business-to-business network thing, to entertain secretaries while they were waiting for their real stuff to upload or download or whatever. The employers were billed for the whole month's usage of the big service. I and other feature providers got royalties according to how many minutes of our feature were used.

The actual users -- the secretaries -- weren't pestered for payments, they just kept drawing cards as long as they liked, and the software kept the record of how long they'd been connected.