The subscription model might have been made famous by the Netflix all-you-can-eat plan though we might have come to a juncture where we may not have to subscribe to a service anymore. It’s the Swedish start-up Sesamy that envisages people being able to make single purchases, which can be an e-book, audiobook, or podcasts without requiring you to subscribe for the same. As TheNextWeb reported, Sesamy has already set up partnerships with almost all major book publishers in Sweden and Denmark thereby enabling users to buy a single purchase of digital content.
Another positive with the digital content purchased via Sesamy is that it can then be read or listened to on any app or device. What that means is the audiobook or e-book reader app already installed in your device will serve to be just fine for listening to or reading the content that you buy via Sesamy. Further, you become the owner of the content thus purchased, instead of those being with you as long as a subscription is active, as is often the case with many a subscription model.
In short, it’s a new business model that will let publishers monetize non-subscribed readers as well using the new SmartID software solution that Sesamy launched in partnership with the Swedish publisher Breakit. That way, SmartID will serve as an additional revenue stream on top of the subscription service they already have. A nice aspect of the software is its integrated price optimization feature that acts to offer a fair retail cost to readers and publishers.
All of this has come at a time when major world economies are faltering, and people are forced to look for ways to save costs. Such people can still have what they wish to read or listen to without having to subscribe to it. Most people often end up subscribing but rarely get the time to make the most of it. What is even worse is that the subscription auto-renews itself which often ends up costing more to the members than what it would have cost had they made the purchases individually in the long run.
Sesamy is next targeting the newspaper and magazine segment and is aiming to make purchasing single issues of it more cost-effective by making good use of the €3.3 million funding round that it announced this week. The company isn’t in the business to offer free e-books but is aiming to make them more affordable.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I'll likely make a film sometime in the future.
