Business models for Australian book publishing

The book Books, Bytes and Business: The Promise of Digital Publishing (by Bill Martin and Xuemei Tian), includes a chapter "Business models for book publishing in Australia". Both authors are at the Department of Information Technology and Management, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne and so eminently qualified to comment on Australian publishing, particularly academic publishing. They provide formal technical models for publishing in Australia, including new POD, collaborative and "freemium" models (free access to some content, but premium charge for others).

This book will be useful for those looking at publishing. The Government's Book Industry Strategy Group and anyone wondering how to do academic publishing, need to read it.

Fittingly, this book is available as a Amazon.com Kindle e-Book as well as hardback:

How are businesses responding to global changes in markets driven by changes in technology? Whatever the industry, the trends are familiar: globalization and the rise of industrial conglomerates, mergers and
acquisitions, the networking of businesses and markets, outsourcing and shifts in the distribution of resources and production, all reflected in the emergence of new players, new products and services and new forms of competition.

As arguably the first knowledge-based business, book publishing provides an ideal
setting for the study of challenge and opportunity. The industry is currently
experiencing fierce levels of competition, extreme financial pressures, restructuring and the threat of technology-induced obsolescence. Added to these are the challenges posed by new and potential entrants to the market, the emergence of new products and services, new ways of doing business, including trading in virtual markets, and the vulnerability of traditional business models.

The suitability of book publishing as a context for researching the emergence of knowledge-based business becomes all too apparent. Through combining primary research with secondary analysis drawn from the relevant literatures, "Books, Bytes and Business" is both a readable and informative account of business in the knowledge-based economy.