In the wake of the controversies surrounding both library e-books and Amazon’s lending program, O’Reilly Media’s Safari Books, a joint venture with Pearson, offers a subscription content-access model that may offer some answers to both situations. At TOC’s closing afternoon keynotes, Safari Books CEO Andrew Savikas provided an overview of the trend toward “usage-based” streaming content, a model that is growing in popularity in a variety of media and services.
Safari Books offers online access to a library of 20,000 titles through subscriptions. Launched in 2001, the service initially offered access to a library of IT titles, but Savikas says that “only about half of Safari’s titles are tech oriented. We’ve worked to bring in a range of titles and books not usually associated with Safari Books.” Video content is also a growing part of Safari’s inventory as well.
Savikas calls Safari, “a Hulu.com for books,” and a “publisher-friendly” subscription service. The service, he said, has registered “double digit growth” over the last 10 years. He likened the model to ZipCar, NetFlix and Spotify, subscription access models for car rentals, TV and film and music, that continue to attract a growing number of consumers comfortable with easy access rather than ownership.
Among the advantages of the “all you can eat” model: no DRM—“people usually want DRM removed,” said Savikas—since content is streamed; increased revenue to publishers since they are paid every time a page in a book is used; and easy access to new markets (despite offering only English language content, 30% of Safari’s customers are from outside the U.S.). Savikas said Safari pays publishers about 7 cents page, roughly an average of $28 for 400 pages aggregated over hundreds of thousands of readers a month. Savikas emphasized that publishers are being paid repeatedly for consumer access to the same content, rather than the one-time sale of a physical book or e-book download.
Not only is Mobile access growing, but the use of laptop and desktop computers to access Safari content also continue to grow, Savikas said, indicating mobile customers are adding to its consumers rather than just replacing PC users. “And more than half of our usage is for titles more than three years old,” said Savikas indicating the impact of “long tail” on Safari books.
And most of Safari’s users are institutions, including a growing number of corporate libraries, Savikas said, noting the recent controversies surrounding libraries and e-book lending. “Our model works for libraries, it’s predictable for library budgets, gives publishers more control, there’s no waiting for patrons and usage generates revenue,” he said.
Savikas said Safari has more than 2,000 business enterprise accounts offering from 2 to 22,000 concurrant seats (or more) on the service. Businesses with as many as 15,000 employees use Safari Books, and Savikas said, “it generates far more revenue than the sale of single physical book.” Indeed he said the word is getting out, “more than half of our free trials convert to paid subscriptions.”
And he emphasized that being a part of Safari allows helps publishers attract new customers looking for a comprehensive inventory of content--Safari offers books from more than 70 publishers and 90% of its titles are tracked in BookScan. “Publishers can’t do it all alone,” he said.
