It took the P+E paradigm as far as it could on its own, but that wasn't far enough. Shelfie worked hard to sign deals with publishers and distributors, and to make the app easy to use. But then you'd have to use that separate app to read your Shelfie titles.)īut none of this was the company's fault. (OK, you could read them on Kindle Fires if you knew how to bypass the Amazon app store and install and configure an e-reader app that's compatible with the Adobe DRM. And if you were buying e-books instead of print books, you'd likely be buying them from Amazon (or Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc.), and you wouldn't need Shelfie anymore.įinally, some of the e-books it provided were DRM-protected those couldn’t be read on Kindle devices. You certainly wouldn’t make Shelfie a regular destination for your e-book buying or library management. Occasionally Shelfie would send you an email saying that they've added more publishers maybe you’d try again sometime. You’d take a shelfie, find that it only had e-book deals available on a few of your books, maybe take advantage of a couple, and move on. Third, Shelfie’s model did not encourage frequent uses.
Note that this is “from publishers that made a deal with,” not “titles actually available as e-books in Shelfie’s catalog.” Some publishers, like those majors, only licensed limited titles to Shelfie. A Shelfie chart from December 2015 shows that about 16% of “books on an ‘average’ shelf are from publishers that signed a deal with” for e-books. It only got selected titles from two of the “big five” trade publishers: HarperCollins, typically the most aggressive among the majors in trying new digital business models, and Macmillan.
Second, Shelfie’s catalog lacked titles from major publishers. But it also was a hassle and lowered the value of your print book if you were to resell it.
This process helped ensure that multiple people couldn’t use the same print book to get a cheap/free e-book.
First, in order to claim your discounted or free e-book, you had to go through a multi-step process with the Shelfie app: take a picture of a book verify that it correctly recognized the book you photographed sign your name on the copyright page of the print book take a photo of that and send it in then download your e-book.
0 kommentar(er)
