It was that last article that caught the attention of Perlego, a subscription service that is attempting to crack the all-you-can-read model by focusing on a niche: textbooks. After a quick interview, I’m cautiously optimistic about the project.
What’s Perlego?
Perlego is a monthly ebook subscription service that offers university students unlimited access to over 200,000 titles for £12 a month (which is about $15.50 U.S., or, more importantly, less than the price of a single print book). Students can sign up for free and read over 50,000 public domain ebooks or can shell out Premium money to read 150,000 ebooks and publications from most of the leading professional and academic publishers across a range of subjects, from Business to Philosophy. Their mission is to make textbooks both more affordable and more accessible, which is a pretty easy mission to get behind: Prices for textbooks have risen 1,041 percent since 1977.
How It’s Rolling Out
Perlego was founded in August 2016 by Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis with £500k in Seed funding.A Beta version was released in the UK in January with 65,000 titles from a few leading publishers such as Wiley and Palgrave to test the product with university students. They are currently focused in the UK, but are planning to expand in the near future. So what sets it apart from the failed Netflix of books models I’ve ranted against in the past?
Why It Works
Oliviero pitched the service to me by stating it was unlike Scribd or Oyster — and like Spotify — because they paid publishers a fixed amount dependent on how much of the publisher’s content was read that month. However, paying publishers more for each view their content gets actually is the model that Scribd used, and it’s what hurt them: Voracious genre readers wound up costing Scribd more than they were worth, just as too many gluttons at an all-you-can-eat restaurant can put it out of business. The reason this model works great for Perlego? Their niche isn’t something most people love reading: It’s a chore to slog through a textbook, and few people have a textbook-a-day reading habit. And since textbooks tend to be wildly overpriced, there’s a huge gap in the market for a startup like Perlego to slip in. But that’s also what seems to be a potential stumbling block for the young streaming service: Why are incumbent publishers bothering to partner with Perlego, who might steal their customers? To complete the analogy, plenty of TV providers out there are wishing they hadn’t been so quick to licence to Netflix, which is now eating their lunch.
Why Publishers Are On Board
I asked Oliviero about initial resistance from publishers, and how Perlego won them over. Second-hand market sales now account for 30 percent of total textbook sales, according to Oliviero, meaning that publishers don’t see a dime of a third of their market. Some chose to rent instead, and pirated copies of the most recent edition are also running rampant. Perlego offers publishers a way to monetize all those students who would never have bought a textbook new in the first place. They even shared data on who’s reading what, helping the publishers out more. In reality, professional publishers have been losing business as they have wildly overpriced core-textbooks and students have resorted to finding different solutions to avoid paying for new books altogether.”
And They’re Positioned to Expand
If their niche is as profitable as it looks, Perlego could grow fast and earn revenue quickly: The textbook-rental service Chegg IPO’d in 2013 and is worth $1.4 billion now. But for now, they are sticking to what they know: Oliviero tells me they have no plans to go beyond “academic and professional content.” But if anyone at Perego does have Netflix-sized ambitions, it’s easy to see how they’d get there: Strong revenue from a great niche could power the kind of content acquisition that no other Netflix-of-books model has had the chance to try.
