UK startup Valobox is adopting a unique take on purchasing ebooks. The company allows customers to buy the entire book, particular pages, or specific chapters. This might be perfect for students who are writing reports and might not be interested in the whole book.
The essence of the platform is all books you purchase are stored in the cloud and accessible on most popular internet browsers. You can view them on your PC, tablet, or phone. When you buy a few chapters of the book at a time, the overall price of the book actually comes down. Obviously, this new company is focusing on students with many of its launch partners offering a ton of content. Some of the publishers that have bought into Valobox are O’Reilly Media, Profile Books, Guardian Books, Constable & Robinson, and Snowbooks.
So how does this entire process work in relation to dealing with publishers? The CEO of the company Anna Lewis recently said, “Publishers set an ebook’s price and ValoBox splits it up, primarily based on the book’s table of contents. We’re interested in the way micro-purchasing works within books. Some content lends itself well to being available on a page-purchase level, and some publishers have said they want a one-chapter minimum.”
So how do publishers actually make money with users not buying the whole book? Publishers will receive a minimum of 60% of the sale and an additional 25% if they sell it through their own websites or content distribution channels. Valobox has developed an “embedding” platform that allows people to display the books on any website or blog. After it’s all said and done, ValoBox makes around 15% from each sale, no matter where it stemmed from.
The UK based company has only just launched its new service and it will be interesting to track its growth. Early next year, the company intends on releasing apps for Android and iOS to make buying and reading much easier.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
