[wortelefant]

I wish the publishing industry would create a flatrate model for books and magazines, I would gladly pay for it. With the current business model, digital versions are often more expensive than the printed one. Shadow libraries like z-lib, scihub or Annas Archive are just a symptom: we have a near unlimited demand for digital knowledge, but the supply logic still based on the idea of paper and scarcity.

[dublinben]

Digital products are also worse than physical ones, because the content cartels have used DRM to trample on your first-sale rights like resale and lending. It's no coincidence that digital books are often more expensive than paper books, because the publishers have killed the second hand market.

[autoexec]

digital books also run the risk of being censored or disappeared from your devices overnight. Another nice thing about physical books is that you don't have to worry about anyone spying on you and collecting data on what you read/when/where/how often/how quickly, etc.

[alecco]

Publishers are resisting tooth-and-nail a flatrate model. See previously:

"A 'Netflix of Books' would put publishing houses out of business"

https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119958

[nine_k]

Indeed, most movies make most of the money in the first few weeks of showing. Were it not for the physical limitation of having to go to a theater, much of that money won't be made.

Same with books: were it not for the need to buy a book before it shows up on libgen, or the need to have a physical book, book sales would plummet. Actually this is exactly what some of the anti-copyright activists proclaim as the goal: removing most of the need to buy a book, at least from the publisher.

Of course, there is the counter-example of music: people who pirate music also buy a lot of music, when the price is below the impulse buy threshold; see Bandcamp or Apple Music. The lack of copy protection does not incite them to pirate the same material, because they want to support their favorite bands. Those bands which did not sign up with major labels, of course, because the major labels earn and pay a significantly different amounts of money.

[csande17]

O'Reilly has had a subscription platform for technical books for a long time now. Used to be called "Safari Books Online", now it's "O'Reilly Online Learning". It's become a pretty standard benefit for public libraries and large workplaces.

[matwood]

It's important not to lump all 'publishers' in a single bucket here. The big 4-5 fight new models, but many outside of those are happy to try different models. See the many publishers who deliver DRM free files or work with libraries using flat rate models.

[numpad0]

There has to be aligned interest and feedback mechanisms for that to work. Otherwise there will be no reasons for publishers to not take 99% cuts for the subscription.