Here’s a Dilemma Every Book Publisher Should Hope to Face

A recent email from Evernote piqued my curiosity. I've used the note-taking tool for years but never found a reason to upgrade from the Basic (free) version to the Premium (paid) version. Their email announced a "Plus" version with a laundry list of features.

Evernote Plus costs half the price of Premium and offers benefits that are somewhere between Basic and Premium. After reviewing the features I decided Basic still suits my needs, so I remain an Evernote freeloader.

I'm sure I'm not alone and I'm equally certain Evernote will continue tinkering with their business models. At some point they'll likely hit on a combination that finally gets me to open my wallet.

You could argue that the biggest challenge for a company like Evernote is finding ways to convert more freeloaders into paying customers. It's a tricky business situation and something that's totally foreign to book publishers.

Why aren't book publishers exploring more viable ways to acquire customers with free content and then converting them into paying customers?

The biggest free tool book publishers use today is a poorly conceived one: the ebook sample. When it comes to nudging prospective customers to click the buy button, most ebook samples are only marginally better than the book's product page description. Samples are also distributed in a manner that doesn't exactly encourage sharing with friends and family.

Simply alerting me to a new book doesn't do the trick either. I'm a big sports fan, mostly baseball and hockey. Long ago I subscribed to an email newsletter telling me about new books as they're published in the sports category. I've never made a single purchase because of that email newsletter.

What I'd love to see, and something that's more likely to drive conversion, is a service that gives me access to super-sized samples and other behind-the-scenes information about interesting new (and old!) sports ebooks. The service should surprise and delight me. Make me want to come back to this site/app by tossing in unexpected and unannounced deals, including ones that might only be available to me.

I'm simply looking for a better path to go from free content to paid content. Give me access to more content than I can get from a limited sample. Bring the authors into the mix and give them a voice at the table. Make them readily available for Google Hangouts and other ways of engaging with the audience.

Content distributed via this service should be completely free of walled gardens. The material must be available for download into whatever reading app the customer chooses. There should be buy buttons at the end of the super-sized sample and they should be offered for all retailers, including the publisher's own website.

Don't forget the data opportunity here. An opt-in could enable user data to flow back to the publishers (e.g., page views, popular titles, sample downloads, purchases, etc.).

A well-designed service like this would have to be developed independent of the retailers; otherwise it simply becomes another extension of their walled gardens. It would also greatly expand the reach and success of plenty of ebooks.

In order for this to succeed, publishers (and authors) must be willing to make more of their precious content available for free. They'll eventually face the same dilemma Evernote faces every day, but I'd argue that's a problem every book publisher should embrace.