Books Subscription: Idea Validation
Hi guys! I just had an idea recently. Are you willing to subscribe to a book library app that gives you access to all sorts of e-books, e-journals, podcasts, etc
Target market primarily are students but also those who love reading books.
To add more to the database, I want to attract Authors/Publishers wherein they get royalties for every read from their book (Like you get $$ for every views of certain number of views in videos). As they give us rights for their book. Im not very sure with the legal implications for this.
Any thoughts?
You have a few challenges that you need to validate with that.
First, marketplaces have a classic chicken&egg problem, since you can't start with both the demand and supply side at the same time. So you need to answer the question of how do you (a) get one without the other, and (b) how do you then entice the other side with the existence of a supply of (a).
In this case, my uninformed guess is that it'll be easier to get authors in some niche than it would be to get people to read them. For authors, you could just say, "I'll do all the work to add your books and I'll pay you if people X." There are a bunch of places that authors out - after all, they're trying to post their content.
The buyer side seems harder. How do you distribute "views" for books? Are you going to build a full ebook reader? Downloads? How do you signal that stories are any good? Why would people think to come here? Why would they pay? Spotify's free tier works because they insert ads between songs. Does it still work if you can't do that?
There are some aspects of marketplaces that help you out. For example, the authors are incentivized to forward people to your site to get money.
Good luck!