Pay Per Use eBooks
Rob Horning’s great Marginal Utility post at PopMatters called the time cost of free goods got me thinking how great it would be to be able get a book for free then only pay when you use it. If your attention wanes at page 23 of that new novel, then you would pay a fraction of what you would pay if you read the whole thing.
Horning references a postage system for email where the sender pays. If the receiver reads the email and finds it useful the receiver can refund the sender’s fee.
Horning thesis is basically…
we risk making everything we have accumulated worthless from the sheer inability to find anything or decide among things.
Books should be free not because they can be infinitely copied but because they can only be finitely consumed.
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