Digital Content Business Models with AZARDI

Other Articles in the AZARDI:Content Fulfilment series:

Content Delivery Methods with AZARDI

What Real Digital Rights Management Can Deliver

Not all digital book distribution is through e-retail outlets. Publisher direct sales and distribution is a powerful and valid option for many categories of eBooks. There is even an argument that every publisher should be selling their own books from their own bookstore, or publisher cooperative bookstores.

There are many business cases where publishers need to deliver their content directly to their customers. This includes academic, education (all levels), high interactive, multi-language, institution and business publishers. There is a lot of content and business requirements that simply do not fit, and will never fit the rigid “one size” models such as Amazon and Apple and other major e-Retail outlets.

AZARDI:Content Fulfilment (ACF) and the AZARDI Reading platforms are focused on reliable and controlled delivery of valuable digital content to end users with flexible business models under publisher control.

ACF is also designed to be white-label branded and customized so any publisher can project their brand while delivering their content to their readers.

Publisher Business Fulfilment Models

Digital book content exists for many different markets and needs many different delivery and business options. AZARDI:Content Fulfilment has the following business models:

Book Sales

Sell Books. This is the standard retail model available for single book sales. It's just like every other e-Retail model out there.

Sell Book Collections. With ACF sales is extended to allows book collections. This can be used for discounting bulk sales or the purchase of book sets where appropriate.

Any specific eBook can be sold independently and in any number of collections.

Book Subscriptions

ACF has two primary subscription business models: Date and period.

Date subscriptions. These have fixed start and end dates. These are suitable for courseware and education content with known start and end dates. The books are available from the start date and expire on the end date. 

Period subscriptions. These are more general and extend a subscription period from the purchase date for a defined time. Eg: 30, 60, 90 or 120 day subscription.These can be set to any day count.

Books subscriptions. Either subscription business model can be applied to individual books.

Book Collection subscriptions. Either subscription model can also be applied to book collections. Book collection subscriptions are very important for eductation content delivery

Book or Collection Loans (Library Model)

The loan or library model lets the publisher make a book or a collection of books available to an institution. The publisher can set the maximum number of simultaneous loans per book and the loan period available for each book. This model is useful for academic publishers who want to make their books available to an institution on a controlled IP access address. If there are no "loans" available the user can be put into the loan queue and will be notified when a users loan period has expired or they "return" the book.

IP Address Sale or Subscription

A special fulfilment model is access to book libraries (collections) by users coming from a controlled IP Address.This makes all of the above models useful for getting books to insititutions.

For example a user must log in to an institutions library site with their institution authorized ID. From there on they can access the content using any of the above business models. We currently operate this model around the world in dozens of countries. It is effectively an "institution" subscription that can be turned on and off on agreed dates. In this case the commerce is between the publisher and institution and the delivery tools enforce that.

Magazine Periodical subscriptions

This is a special case for subscriptions. The customer purchases a subscription based on number of editions issues periodically for a time. Typically 12 monthly periodicals over a year. The system then delivers the periodic editions as they become available.

This type of subscription has it's own business challenges. IE. Handling a user subscription cancellation;

In Conclusion

AZARDI:Content Fulfilment  brings a wide range of new and powerful business models to the delivery of digital content for publishers of all types. It is especially powerful for the delivery of education, training research and academic content. This level of business flexibility is new to most people in the digital content world, but Infogrid Pacific have been operating AZARDI:Content Fulfilment since 2011 for various publishers around the world. Other than the watermarked ePub3 format the system delivers the content to AZARDI readers, which are white-labeled with the publishers brand. AZARDI is the only ePub reading system available on all platforms (Linux, MacIntosh, Windows), devices (Android, iOS) and online in modern browsers.

AZARDI:Content Fulfilment also has extensive and flexible rights agreements models that move way forward and well past the intensely disliked DRM model pushed by major e-Retailers and the Adobe ADE model. We will cover that in another post in the near future.

Posted by: Richard Pipe