Michael Bhaskar asks whether, after all the talk about ebook subscription services, they may be on the point of working.
We've been here before - wondering if book subscriptions will be the new model to dominate (digital) bookselling. If one topic has been a conference essential, it's this one. Yet in the two or three years since talk started, there has been a curious inertia. VC dollars have piled in, the "panel index" has gone through the roof, but concrete change has been more limited. What's really going on?
The proposition for subscriptions are as simple as they are seductive: someone will do for books what Spotify did to music and Netflix did to TV and film. Someone will come and create a new start-up that captures consumers' imaginations, locks in their wallets and rescues creative industries from the cul-de-sac of their own digital business model.
