An ebook reader standing against a pile of printed books

Subscription Models for Digital Literature

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If you are someone who enjoys or is interested in digital literature, you probably know that there are a variety of ways in which you can experience it. Be it ebook or audiobook, the number of platforms you can choose from grows as time passes. In today’s blog post, we want to present you with a brief analysis of the current market for digital literature and its characteristics, trends, and platforms with the services they offer.

One of the main aspects that is necessary to understand about digital literature (and that is a particular characteristic of the subscription-based streaming era we are living in) is that unlike its printed counterpart, digital books are streamed, not owned. This is even true for ebooks that you buy, for example, at Barnes & Noble and on Amazon. You are not truly purchasing a file that you can later lend or give away or sell to someone else if you wish to. Instead, you are paying to gain access to a certain material on a dedicated platform with limited sharing capabilities.

As you do not own your copy, subscription services have to compensate by offering diverse and numerous libraries. Some of these backlist titles can be hard to access in a printed format but are readily available to subscribers of these platforms. Nevertheless, each service is different. The more traditional models, like Scribd, Kindle Unlimited, or the international Storytel, offer a robust library composed of ebooks and audiobooks that you maintain access to as long as your subscription is active, although it might not include the newest titles on the market. In Kindle’s case specifically, the subscription does not offer complete access to their Amazon library, and their book selection fluctuates as well, meaning that not all the titles are available at any given time.

Other models, like Audible (which is owned by Amazon), offer a big library of audiobooks with current releases, but you can only access a limited amount of titles at a time in exchange for a credit. The rest have to be purchased separately. This is a similar model to that of the South Korean platform RidiBooks, which has not been brought over stateside yet. This service offers ebooks and audiobooks but has the particularity that it heavily features serialized fiction that updates constantly, a type of literature that does particularly well on platforms like this or like Webtoon.

Another prominent subscription service that has risen in notoriety is Substack. The platform focuses on connecting independent authors and their audiences more directly, facilitating the process of independent publishing. This is a very tailored experience for both writers and readers. It gives the authors the ability to control how to publish their content—free, paid (minimum of five dollars a month), or a combination of both—where the author gets to choose to make certain posts available to entice the interest of the audience that might not be subscribed. On the audience side, it adjusts the experience to their own needs by offering a variety of filters while also providing the ability to check an author’s page before deciding to subscribe or not.

With subscription-based services on the rise, it’s possible to identify one notorious trend: it is not about providing the same experience as a regular book in a digital form, but rather to deliver an experience to their audience that is specially designed for them and that they could not get otherwise. Instead of trying to replicate what succeeds in the physical format, current models for ebooks and audiobooks services are trying to embrace what makes them unique. Because of this, the future seems to bring further diversification for digital literature and the models of distribution it uses.

Photo of narrator in sound booth

 Recording Audiobooks At Ooligan Press

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The Audiobooks Department is heading into its second year at Ooligan Press, as audiobook production was previously overseen by the Digital Department. Audiobooks is now organized as a separate department because of the time intensive scripting, recording, and editing process required to produce audiobooks. I, Paige Zimmerman, am currently the second-ever Audiobooks Coordinator at Ooligan Press! My goal for this year-long role is to prepare as many of our books as possible for recording, and then set the department up for the future process of regularly recording audiobook versions of our books, which will improve the accessibility and availability of our books to readers.

Our ultimate goal as a department and press is to publish all versions of a book (print, ebook, and audiobook) on the same publication date. This has not been so easily accomplished in the history of the program, as we do not yet have our own recording space, and collaborations with recording studios can be expensive, especially for our student-run press.

This year, Ooligan Press is taking on its first attempt to record an audiobook without hiring the services of a professional recording studio and producer. We are starting with Faultland by Suzy Vitello: a compelling family drama set amidst a natural disaster in Portland, Oregon.

Last fall, the script for the audiobook was generated by students by taking the final manuscript and separating out different character voices from the narrator and tagging them with specific colors to signify a voice change to the narrator.

During the spring term, Ooligan students auditioned to narrate the manuscript. Then, similarly to other decisions made by our democratic press, students voted to choose the narrator of Faultland, and Jillian Bowen was chosen to narrate.

We are working with KPSU, Portland State University’s campus radio station, to record Faultland. The manager of KPSU, Ned Tillbrook, and the technical director, Carly, have assisted us with setting up the equipment we use for each session and finding the right spaces to work within the environment of the KPSU studio and offices. We are using Adobe Audition to record audio because Ooligan students already use the Adobe Creative Suite to create social media posts, book cover designs, interior book layouts, and other marketing and production documents.

Rather than use the same sound booth as the radio DJs, which only allows for one sound board operator at a time, we are utilizing a larger soundproofed room which features multiple microphones which have been used previously for podcasts and radio talk shows. While our narrator sits in the sound booth and reads through the audiobook script, I take the role of director and read along with the script on the other side of a window into the booth and provide clarity on pronunciation and line delivery as needed. Because the booth is soundproofed, the narrator and I use microphones and headphones connected to the same audio interface so we can hear each other. This audio interface is also plugged into my computer to record the audio.

Finally, once the process of recording the audiobook is complete, I will turn my attention to editing the recording to remove any extraneous sounds and errors in the narration. Once the audio is fully edited, the audiobook will be uploaded to distribution websites and will be available for purchase.