Episode 30: Emma Watson on Subscription Ebook Sales Models

Ebook piracy is a constant struggle for some publishers, especially when their books are used in academic settings. In many cases, this can be due to the availability of the content, not an inability or lack of desire to pay for it. In this episode of the BookSmarts podcast, Joshua talks with Emma Watson, the Account Manager at Perlego, a UK-based book subscription service, about how subscription models can help alleviate piracy issues.

The two talk about how solid SEO can help redirect readers who are looking for free content to subscriptions that legally provide what they need, the fears that publishers have when considering subscription services, and how data provided by subscription services can help you understand your readers better.

You can learn more about Perlego at Perlego.com and on their Instagram @Perlegobooks.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent 

So this week on the BookSmarts podcast, I’m excited to talk with Emma Watson who is the Account Manager at Perlego. Emma and I have been chatting a little bit about subscription services and things because Perlego is an ebook subscription platform that’s based in the UK—Emma, thanks for joining me.

Emma Watson 

Thanks for having me, Joshua.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, this is pretty cool. Because, you know, I haven’t talked about subscription platforms before yet on the podcast. I like talking about new things, I always talk about metadata and things like that. So let’s talk about subscriptions. So we actually did a webinar with you guys, for our Firebrand clients, because you’re one of the partners that we send data to and kind of got the ball rolling on this kind of conversation. So I want to just talk to you about kind of the purpose behind subscription models and, kind of how this stuff works. And also, you guys are big into helping publishers avoid ebook piracy. So let’s start there and then we can talk about subscriptions as well. So what are kind of the root causes of ebook piracy? And why does it seem from your perspective to be getting worse right now?

Emma Watson 

Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I think it’s a pretty complex issue and there’s quite a few reasons why. I’m sure for those that are trying to, you know, download and access books, free of charge, there’s different reasons for different people, and maybe a bit of column A bit of column B. What are the reasons? I think is, and this is often the most touched upon reason, affordability, you know, in the textbook market, it’s increased by like, 800%, over the past 30 years. I’m sure it’s the same across the world, but the cost of living is going up. So they’re quite an obvious, you know, quite obvious reasons. But I think the reasons that people perhaps don’t think of is accessibility, that’s a very broad term for a variety of, you know, ways in which people try and access books, you know, they might only want part of the book. That might be because if you’re a student, you know, you need a few pages for your particular module. I mean, I did an English and French degree, and I had a lot of recommended books to read. And, you know, I didn’t get around to reading them all. And if I did, I’d only needed a paragraph, you know, to quote a certain critic. So there’s that kind of use case—but also, you know, sometimes it’s a rights issue, you know, the books aren’t available in your territory—but they’re available in the States, perhaps, but not in the UK. I was reading about this TikTok trend, it’s really interesting. It was about how young people as a young Gen Z are being encouraged to, you know, read and return books to Amazon, which I think is a really fascinating concept of returning an ebook.  I don’t know if you’ve encountered that, or, but—sort of, yeah—the influencers on TikTok are really, you know, encouraging that kind of usage. So accessibility is a broad, a broad topic, I would say, and in terms of piracy.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that’s interesting—The TikTok influencers should not be telling people to return their ebooks like that—so yeah, it’s an interesting point, too. I mean, when we say accessibility, and publishing, obviously, for ebooks, usually, that has its own kind of connotations. But what you’re talking about is, accessibility in a much broader sense, which I think is really important for us to understand, you know, people want to read what they want to read when they want to read it, or they need to read what they need to read when they need to read it. Right. So this, you know, that’s an interesting kind of approach to remember that, especially from an education standpoint, there’s different needs and different desires, even on the consumer or the reader part. So, on the ebook piracy side, just kind of continue that down that line. What do you guys see when, I’m assuming you’re doing some research at Perlego about this, where are people getting access to files right now? What kind of places should publishers be aware of as sources of pirated content?

Emma Watson 

Yeah, it’s one of those things is a bit of a—it’s a bit of a tip of the iceberg, you know, when you start looking into it, and I can’t claim to know all the pirate sites out there, but you know, we do look into sort of similar web if it’s, I don’t know, add-on you can use on Google to kind of see traffic and things and that’s a really interesting tool, it’s a free Google add-on, already pushing anything, but— it’s where you can see really high volumes of traffic to the likes of said Library, Sci-Hub, PDF drive, they’re some of the are the major ones. But effectively, if you go back to how consumers and people tend to find things for free, they’ll type what they want, you know, the name of the book, maybe the author, maybe not. And then they’ll add free, or they’ll add PDF, or free ebook or through download—and so whatever comes up on the web is what they’re going to find. So often, as I say, it’s these kinds of key sites. But I mean, I’ve read stories and sort of, you know, something I’ve looked into quite a lot, you know— WhatsApp, WeChat—many ways that piracy can be or pirated versions can be disseminated—yeah, there’s some of the key websites I would sort of, say, are the most well known.

Joshua Tallent 

Interesting. Yeah, and that whole searching on Google thing, I’m just, I’m looking for a free PDF of such-and-so book, or looking for a free ebook, or such and so book, that’s a pretty straightforward thing. Most people use Google or some other search engine for stuff anyway, they don’t know where to start themselves. So you know, it’s not like most people are gonna go looking at specific sites, they’re gonna go looking in general. So, how do you think subscription models help this process, this problem? Obviously, if people are trying to get free content, what’s the subscription model going to do to help a publisher with that?

Emma Watson 

I think it’s subscription, but it’s also the access-based approach, you know, when we’re talking about people wanting what they want, or what they need kind of two separate things, but let’s say what they want or what they need, when they want it, and how they need it, you know, those kinds of categories. That’s where the access-base model, I believe, really comes in—because, you know, if you want to buy an ebook, or print book in perpetuity, and you need it, you know, day in day out for your, I don’t know, you could be a student, or you could be a practitioner, you could be just wanting to have the book on your shelf, you’re gonna buy it. But if you just need a part of that book, and you know, even the most affordable publishers out there that I know, and most publishers I speak to are really cognizant, and really want people to pay for their books, of course, so that’d be incredibly affordable. Even if a book say, I don’t know, $7, $5 incredibly affordable. If you just need a paragraph with that book, or maybe even a quote, are you going to pay $7? I don’t think many people would, I think it’s still seek given the amount of the book that the user is looking for. So it’s in those instances where people are looking for part of the book, that’s where access-based models which, you know, lend themselves well to subscription and the ability to pay X amount every month, or you know, whatever cadence, that’s where they come in useful. And that’s where, you know, Perlego, for example, were able to, you know, generate revenue from that part of the market that otherwise gets lost.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, it’d be similar to microtransactions that you see in gaming, where I’m playing a video game, and I have a desire to get this one thing and so I’m going to spend my three coins that happened to cost me 20 cents in real money or whatever. It’s a model that allows me as the consumer to have control over what I’m consuming, but also still allows the creator of that content or that thing to gain the value of that as well. It’s an interesting kind of approach to things. I obviously, subscription models work—in a variety of ways in publishing, we see obviously, on the ebooks side, there’s libraries subscription platforms, you know, overdrive and things like that—so when we’re looking at the market, what do you see as the major concerns publishers have? What have you heard publishers saying about subscription models said that they’re worried about that subscription model is doing?

Emma Watson 

Yeah, I mean, there are many other players in the market other than Perlego and obviously, everyone has different business models and different ways of doing things. But, you know, before I’ve said any words, to anyone, I’m kind of just mentioned the word that we are a subscription base or subscription platform, the concern tends to be the value of the book, you know, and the concern that if you’re—you don’t know unit price necessarily on the book or some do, but at Perlego it’s more the revenue share model—that that would devalue the cost of the book. That’s a concern, particularly that we see but I think subscription in general—I don’t know it’s interesting because you see subscription across so many parts of our lives, right? You know, most people have a Netflix or Spotify, maybe a Gym account. I do think that, there’s perhaps a little fear that it’s going to take over everything, that everything will be subscribed to every element of our life and perhaps there’s something a bit insidious about that. But then if that creeps into publishing, you know, what next? So I think there’s an element of the Sci-Fi potentially when you’re, you know, discussing subscription—particularly with, you know, really well esteemed, really long running publishing houses.

Joshua Tallent 

Concerned that it devalues the content in some way and sets it apart is like now, this is actually, it’s something that we’ve talked about a lot in publishing over the years, you know, I have an ebook that is of a textbook, right? It’s a textbook, but that I want to sell, or it’s a monograph of some kind of some or you know, some sort of combined work consolidated, edited volume. And so, we’ve got a lot of chapters, we could break them up and put them into, you know, sell them individually—but what’s the value of that one chapter compared to the value of the whole book? And so we kind of have this, it’s kind of a different model than you see in, say music, right? Spotify is taken over music and now you can listen to one track, one song from an album, instead of having to buy the whole CD, where the whole eight tracks or whatever it happens to be. It’s a different kind of approach with publishing because we put a lot of time and effort into this one book, into the whole book. And the whole book means something, and the whole book has value. And we don’t want necessarily people having that ability to devalue the content. So I could totally see how a publisher looking at subscription models would be concerned about that, especially if it’s a subscription, and I’m only going to be giving them you know, getting a very small piece of the pie when they’re accessing the entire thing. So I guess that’s where you could potentially break up content, you know, and obviously, maybe even limit the types of content that you put into a subscription service. Are you seeing publishers doing that? Where they’re saying, well, we’re going to value the entire book at a certain amount, and also value each individual piece of the book, or the more popular pieces of the book, and the more necessary pieces of book in, you know, different way as well, so that those can be accessible, and we can get the gain the value for that piece as well?

Emma Watson 

I mean, we don’t personally on Perlego sort of split the book, you know, if a publisher is delivering us a title, the book will be available in its entirety but I have seen and I can’t think of the names, but there are other players in the market that do offer sort of parts of the book, and so you appeal to that partial appetite for parts of the book, will they eat a part of the book? And I think it’s a really interesting approach, I think it’s perhaps limiting, you know, like, if someone wants, they need chapter one, let’s say for their reading, and they just whatever the model may be on the other platforms, they have to pay X amount, let’s say, to acquire chapter one of an economics book, let’s say. However, have they actually been able to access the full amount of the book? They might have thought, ah, chapter eight, has a really interesting nugget that I wanted to put in my essay. And actually, they start talking about chapter seven, I think it can be quite limiting in terms of how, because I think if you pay, I have no idea. I’m spit balling here, but let’s say someone pays $5 for chapter one, they might put them off, you know, what are the chances they’ll pay for chapter seven that they don’t know if they’re going to want or need, however, had they had the, you know, access to the full book? Yeah, they might have actually engaged with more and generated more revenue. So I think it can be limiting in that sense.

Emma Watson 

I mean, we don’t personally on Perlego sort of split the book, you know, if a publisher is delivering us a title, the book will be available in its entirety but I have seen and I can’t think of the names, but there are other players in the market that do offer sort of parts of the book, and so you appeal to that partial appetite for parts of the book, will they eat a part of the book? And I think it’s a really interesting approach, I think it’s perhaps limiting, you know, like, if someone wants, they need chapter one, let’s say for their reading, and they just whatever the model may be on the other platforms, they have to pay x amount, that’s right, to acquire chapter one of an economics book, let’s say. However, have they actually been able to access the full amount of the book? They might have thought, ah, chapter eight, has a really interesting nugget that I wanted to put in my essay. And actually, they start talking about chapter seven, I think it can be quite limiting in terms of how, because I think if you pay, I have no idea. I’m spit balling here, but let’s say someone pays $5 for chapter one, they might put them off, you know, what are the chances they’ll pay for chapter seven that they don’t know if they’re going to want or need, however, had they had the, you know, access to the full book? Yeah, they might have actually engaged with more and generated more revenue. So I think it can be limiting in that sense.

Joshua Tallent 

So what do you think about when publishers trying to connect more with consumers? How can a subscription model help a publisher become more understood as a resource for a specific person or for a consumer? You know, one of the problems we’ve had in publishing for so long is that, you know, publishers publish their books, and they’re sold by other companies so publishers don’t have as much direct consumer access so it’s harder for them to really build a brand in a sense with those consumers. Now, if I’m selling my ebooks through a subscription service, how can I, as a publisher, gain the benefit of building a relationship with those consumers and maybe marketing better to them, or at least understanding them better? If nothing else, so that I can then create better content to meet their needs? How does subscription help with that maybe?

Emma Watson 

Again, I think it’s more the access in the subscription if we are gonna play semantics on it. I think access allows the ability to go on to data from users in terms of how books are being accessed and that’s pretty crucial. I think, in terms of, you know, as I say, let’s say someone is accessing chapter one  but they’re actually in a little bit of chapter seven. Why didn’t they go for, you know, two to six? Why has that user skipped four chapters? What is the use case? And what are we seeing as a trend, and a pattern, and that information that we can provide, you know, for example, at Perlego back to publishers is like gold dust, you know, it’s the information that you would have to sit in someone’s living room and watch them read the book to collect. So I think it’s data, that access can allow you to, you know, gather and then return to publishers. And that’s because you’re, you know, as a subscription platform, as an access-based platform you can see how and when users are accessing really granular, specific parts of the book.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, and aggregated over many titles over time, you start to see patterns that evolve that, you know, in this book, we’ve noticed that the chapters on these topics are most important to people or seem to be getting the most traction. So how can we hit that market? How can we, you know, address that need more and find other works to discuss that?—data mining is always, here I go with talking about data again, that seems to be what my podcast is always about. But it is a really important part of the publishing process, I think. And yeah, that subscription model does seem like it would give you a platform that gives you that kind of data could be helpful for you as a publisher. If nothing else, just allowing you to see what people are reading, even if it doesn’t allow you to target them specifically, it does allow you to know what they’re reading and what they care about. So that’s pretty cool.

Emma Watson 

I think in terms of future, you know, future planning, if there are certain trends you’re seeing, and you’re perhaps planning on focusing on a different discipline or a different subtopic. It might be worth, you know, assessing that data to then inform future commissioning, editorial decisions. I think in the long term, you know, everyone wants to make user, consumer-centric decisions, you know, that’s best business. And access-based models can help achieve that.

Joshua Tallent 

And that’s even for backlist titles too, you know, backlist has become very important for publishers over the last couple of years. As we’ve seen, the percentage of sales of books has, obviously it’s very weighted toward backlist, and its online sales have pushed that even more, you know, having more data about what people are reading right now, what are people interested in right now, even if you’re not targeting those specific books for marketing, knowing that in the last month, you know, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of people who are reading, you know, topics about DEI, or something like that, or about the specific area of—you know, some sort of mathematical issue or whatever, that can help you market those books better in the general marketplace, right. So you get the data from the subscription model service and be able to use that to inform marketing and advertising decisions you’re making across your entire library. This is all data informed. And I’ll point people back to episode three of the podcast where I talked with Guy LeCharles Gonzalez about this issue of being data informed, not data driven, right. Having the idea that I can take data from a lot of different places and I can be informed about how that data will help me in other ways, and not necessarily being driven by it, right—You know, have to take the data and do something with it, but it’s beneficial, right? Having good data really helps you as a publisher, engage things in a much more effective way and this is just another data source I could see very easily. So what are you guys doing at Perlego? Specifically, we’ve been talking mostly generically about kind of what’s going on with subscriptions and stuff but tell me a little bit about what Perlego does and how you help publishers with this process.

Emma Watson 

So at Perlego, all we’re doing is we’re going to Google, you know, we’re going to the source when a consumer is typing in new title, PDF free download, we are really capitalizing on that behavior that we know, students, but also general consumers are doing, you know. I say general consumers, because you do see a ton of piracy on Trade Titles as well and it’s as much an issue for academic publishing, as it is for trade publishing. So we effectively maximize the SEO on those pirate search terms so by that I mean the title plus, you know, 30 derivations of PDF free download, free PDF, etc. So when someone’s searching for that, normally, what would come up is a ton of pirate sites. But we want to make sure that the link to that book on Perlego is the top of the search results. It’s the first thing they see, the user then clicks onto the link on Perlego. There is a two week free trial, they can enjoy the books on Perlego and it really is the power of diversion and conversion, I would say—yeah, tapping into consumer habits, things that we all know that people do to generate revenue where revenue was not being made before for publishers.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, I like that diversion and conversion. You know, most people from all the studies that have been done, most people are wanting to do the right thing. You know, they need something in the moment they’ve got some problem they need to fix but in reality they don’t necessarily want to steal from a publisher or from an author, they really just want to get access to what they need. So you give them the opportunity to divert into a valid way of getting access and convince them that this is a better way to get it anyway because you get access to so much more without having to go do those random searches and download some file that’s probably got a virus in it, or something else that you know, could cause problems for you. That’s great.

Emma Watson 

Yeah, we did some research a couple of years ago, and sort of how in this case, students perceive piracy? And there’s a stat that 88% of those interviewed, did not associate downloading files for free as criminal. I thought that’s really interesting, is the point that there’s a perceived difference between students, in particular, trying to get what they need for their courses, or they need to supplement their courses, and how they perceive other types of piracy. And I think that really hones in on what you’re saying that they want to do the right thing, they’re not seeing that as need to be super binary and black and white, or good or bad thing, you know, they’re trying to access what they need. And if we can help those people access what they need at the point when they need it, at the price point they can afford, and that is fair for kind of everyone involved. Then absolutely, because otherwise, you know, as you say, they could get viruses, you know, not get the quality of content that they need to achieve their academic goals, or you know, just really what they want to on the weekend.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that’s good. All right. So we’re out of time. Thank you, Emma. I appreciate you taking some time with me. Tell everybody a little bit about where they can learn more about what Perlego does and follow you guys online.

Emma Watson 

Yeah, absolutely, Perlego.com. And our Instagram, it’s @Perlegobooks so feel free to come and give us a follow—There’s also on the Perlego page, there’s a publisher page at the bottom. So if you want to submit that, you’ll come through to me, and we can sort of go from there. But there’s sort of a publisher submit page, if that’s of interest to anyone. Thanks for listening to you.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, thanks for joining me, I appreciate it. And I’ll put those links in the show notes as well, so people could click on those as well.

Emma Watson 

Thanks, Joshua. Thanks for your time.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a review or rating on Apple podcasts, or Spotify, or wherever you listen. And also, please share the podcast with your colleagues that might be interested in this topic, or other topics we talked about. And if you have some topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining me and getting smarter about your books.