More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
Latest Humble Bundle offers digital music – so why not e-books?
July 26, 2012 | 6:48 pm
|
By Chris Meadows
I’ve covered the Humble Indie Bundles here before—bundles of independent computer games sold at a pay-what-you-want price, in support of the developers and charities (usually Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation). I’ve discussed the potential relevance to e-books, but the Humble Bundle’s latest move has possibly even more relevance—they’ve made the jump from games to digital music.
The latest Humble Bundle is the Humble Music Bundle, which includes albums from MC Frontalot, They Might Be Giants, Christopher Tin, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Jonathan Coulton, and, for beating the average donation ($7.87 at the time of this writing), OK Go. They are made available in both mp3 and lossless FLAC formats.
Purchasers can also use sliders to control where their donation goes. If they want to split it evenly among the charities and the artists, they can do that. If they want They Might Be Giants to get everything, they can do that. At the moment, the top donations don’t seem to be up to the level seen in the gaming bundles, but give it time; it just kicked off today and it’s already earned just over $120,000.
The relevance to e-books is pretty obvious: if they could do a Humble Music Bundle, why couldn’t they do a Humble E-Book Bundle? What’s more, the emergence of the Department of Justice-imposed settlement could make it even easier for such bundles to include works from major publishers—part of the point of it was to get publishers trying new and different business models including bundle offers, not just stay locked into agency. If the publishers are smart, they’re keeping an eye on this humble little offering with an eye toward doing the same thing someday.
To note, I have covered a “StoryBundle” website that said it is planning to do exactly that. But now it’s six months later and that site shows no signs of actually launching—and besides, it doesn’t have the cachet of the successful Humble Bundle brand name behind it. But if Humble can do music, I don’t see why it couldn’t do e-books as well someday.
|
Related Posts:
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
The point of the humble bundle is that it’s by indie devs for indie devs. I think it would defeat the purpose for bundles to include works from “major publishers” who in my very bitter opinion, are corrupted by their old business models.
Think about bundling about 6 – 10 small time authors that no one’s ever heard of. They can be new authors. Include poetry, spoken word (in free unencumbered mp3 format), a play (with full, perpetual performance rights) , novel, and short story. covering the different mediums of literature. Have the offering be a sliding / optional fundraiser to the The Office of Letters and Light, who runs the NanoWriMo contest and writing camps for kids, as well as various national and individual state literacy nonprofit programs. THEN you’d have a fire that will start to burn.
The humble bundle will never work as an advertising / promotional ploy for any kind of money driven thought process. That’s not how it works, and that’s why it is popular and successful. People often don’t even care about the games they buy through these bundles. They try to get the bundles because 1) it’s experimental – they haven’t heard of the games before and likely will never discover these games on their own because it’s just too under the radar and 2) it’s for a Good Cause without any thought given to any corporations or companies.
There is no “cachet” of good name behind the games in a Humble Bundle. It’s more about the Humble Bundle itself imparting the good name to the games being included. I think you’ve gotten it the wrong way around.
Sorry for the confrontational tone, but I feel this article is subverting a good thing. \
I will even put my money in my mouth and start something like I talked about up there. BUT it will never work to the advantage of any publisher if they feel it will drum up PR support for their books.
If you aren’t willing to give up for example full copyright on the books or full perpetual performance rights on plays, then don’t think about including it in a “humble book bundle” because that’s what people actually want.
If you get a play, you should be able to perform it. If you get a book, you should be able to give it to your friend to read, and print it out at will.
That’s at the basis of the humble bundle. To be humble.
Of course this doesn’t work for many authors and for many publishers. That’s what’s special about the choice “what to put in a bundle.” If you can find authors who are open, experimental, and willing to pen something where they say : my readers get to decide where the money goes, who gets to own it, who gets to read it and print it, then you have a candidate.
In the humble bundles, once you purchase the games for any amount of money (including for free), you actually get a zipped package and then a note that basically says: this is the blood, sweat, tears, and the life’s love of some very dedicated developers who don’t have much money. They trust you enough to give you the game outright. You can copy it and pirate it because there is no protection on these games. But the developers are humble, and would like to trust that you as a gamer would respect these games. Have fun and go nuts!
Can you imagine a large publisher doing that with any of their backlog?
I went ahead and read your prior article linked in the first sentence so I know you get it.
But if your readers are not familiar with some of the nonprofits that the Humble Bundle fundraises for: Child’s Play is an American 501(c)(3) that donates video games, consoles, and toys to kids in hospitals as a way to improve the care given to sick kids. Imagine your teen having broken his or her leg while playing on the fields, and having to stay inside in a cast hobbling around the hospital. Child’s Play allows the hospital to have some kind of entertainment while the kid is hospital bound.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a nonprofit that provides legal advice and pro bono lawyers to people being sued over issues relating to digital rights. When Sony or MGM or RIAA, big studios and publishers (book publishers included) files lawsuits to individuals over a bittorrent trail, or try to force ISPs to give up the personal information of their subscribers, the EFF is often involved in the legal defense in these cases, most often for free on behalf of the accused.
Now back to the crux of the argument. The audience is key. For the Humble Bundle, an ebook bundle would need to target the particular kinds of books that gamers and geeks and internet-natives (for lack of a better word) would support.
For example, anything that Cory Doctorow wrote, or something like a story by a cyberpunk / scifi / thriller would work quite well. For other kinds of books, you wouldn’t necessarily get the attraction from the Humble Bundle crowd. With the music bundle you already see it.
The games bundles usually attract millions of dollars of donations through hundreds of thousands of downloads, with top individual donations well over a thousand dollars. Sometimes donors start bidding wars, raising their donations to “one-up” one another.
With this music offering, the results are actually disappointing to me – 21,000 ish downloads, around $100,000 so far, with only a little bit of time left. The top donation is only $300. This tells me that the music offering is not matched with the Humble Bundle audience. If they did an ebook offering, they would really need to pick the right books from the right kind of authors.
For a humble bundle-like offering to work specifically for “books” (ie novels, fiction, poetry, travel writing, cookbooks, service journalism, popular fiction, fantasy, etc) the audience you attract via the fundraising targets have to fit the profile. For example, I gave the NanoWriMo contest as a possible fundraising target. That would attract literary people who like reading and writing, and likes giving money to help kids write. With literacy programs, etc – we are able to attract parents, grandparents who want to see the legacy of readership carry along to the next generation.
Those are my initial thoughts about coming up with a bundle for books. It is a very powerful force – the desire to do good.
I promise I’ll stop filling your comments with these long missives …
Speaking of ebook bundling, I just received this e-mail from Story Bundle:
Dear friends, readers and Earthicans.
StoryBundle is launching soon.
In just a few mere days, you—the voracious reader in search of literary delights—will be able to get our very first bundle. We’re grouping together works from fantastic indie authors into one pay-what-you-want package. In case I stuttered (which is impossible since these are words that you’re reading), I said you can pay what you want. And best of all, you can give part of your purchase to charity!
Excited? Good, because StoryBundle is launching very soon.
So charge up your Kindles, iPads, Android Tablets, smartphones and laptops, because they’re about to get some hardcore usage.
– Jason