Support the Latest Humble Bundle Today: Everything Distribution Should Be
I’ve written before about innovative ways to disseminate media and content that can facilitate industry disruption, such as my recent post on film distribution that highlighted VHX, and my post on music which included a Humble Bundle for music. There is currently a Humble Bundle of eBooks that ends at 7pm EDT today, October 23. Everything about Humble Bundle is awesome, and what content distribution should be.
There are thirteen eBooks for sale in this Humble Bundle, with seven of them only “unlocked” when you pay more than the average price, which is currently $14.22. (To buy all of them separately, it would cost around $157.) As of writing there have been 81,515 purchases, or $1,159,329.83(!) in total. There is also a real-time breakdown of average price paid by OS, with Windows < Mac < Linux. In addition to choosing the price, you can choose how to divide the money you are paying between compensating the individual authors, donating to several charities (including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Scientific Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, and the Child’s Play Charity), and “tipping” the Humble Bundle, Inc., which pays for the bandwidth and development of the promotion. It is remarkable to see exactly where your money is going.
In addition to being able to pay what you want, and support charity, the books are DRM-free, and available in multiple formats. You can download the books anywhere, anytime, and over a variety of eBook formats and file types, for different readers and devices.
As usual, Techdirt has already observed a lot of the points we would make about this being an admirable business model:
We’ve been talking about the first Humble eBook Bundle, which launched recently, and has taken off really successfully. Over the weekend, it zoomed past $1 million in money raised. As author John Scalzi (whose book Old Man’s War is included in the bundle) noted, if Humble Bundle purchases were counted by the NY Times every one of the authors would be on the best seller list. Think about that for a second.
More than 70,000 people have bought these books in just two weeks, and the folks at Humble Bundle passed along the news that the current average price of $13.94 (which keeps on rising, as people pay over the average to unlock all the extras) far surpasses all of their previous bundles. And yet, people keep telling us that there are no business models that work and that people won’t pay for stuff when they can get it for free? When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?
To show your support for this, and encourage more creators and distributors to adopt similar models, you can buy the Humble Bundle here.
