Subscription books remains a no-go area for most book platforms due to publisher resistance as they try to protect the print legacy.
Apple’s overall revenue may be down 1%, but that’s due to soft sales of devices. Apple Services, on the other hand, are at a record high, with more than one billion paid subscriptions across its various content platforms.
Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple News and iCloud+ brought in $21.2 billion for the company this last quarter, up from $19.9 billion.
No breakdown on how the individual elements performed, but of course Apple Books doesn’t get a mention, there being no books subscription option.
Subscription books remains a no-go area for most book platforms due to publisher resistance as they try to protect the print legacy.
But as we see with Kindle Unlimited, which draws heavily on APub and self-published content, there is huge consumer demand for books subscription and as the monthly pay-outs to self-publishers show, there’s gold in them there subscription hills.
In H1 2023 Amazon paid out $278 million in royalties, mostly to self-published authors.
And as we see in the Nordics, where publishers openly embrace subscription, digital books can prove more popular than print.
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