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Joffe Books founder Jasper Joffe and subscriptions specialist John Phillips are the latest speakers to join the line-up for FutureBook Live, The Bookseller's publishing innovation conference, which takes place on 30th November in London.
Joffe and Philips join the panel "Subscription & Streaming: The Future of Bookselling?", along with Alice Revel, founder of the book subscription business Reading Heels (and now also The Ampersand Book Co), and Matt Cockerill, co-founder, the recipe membership website CKBK.
Joffe founded the digital publishing start-up Joffe Books in 2014, and has since generated revenue of £3m, including more than a billion page reads on the Kindle Unlimited subscription service. He recently told The Bookseller that reports that say the digital market is dying are missing key data. "We’ve had a billion page reads on KU, and that’s growing. I just don’t understand the glee with which an e-book slowdown seems to be reported. It’s as if some publishers and the media are happy to kill off a part of the market that is still flourishing."
Phillips, as managing director EMEA for Zuora––the Silicon Valley company that creates cloud-based software which "enables any company in any industry to successfully launch, manage, and transform into a subscription business "––says he’ll be evangelising for why the book trade needs to stop thinking it's so special, and start transitioning to the new standard of the digital economy, now.
Molly Flatt, associate editor of FutureBook and co-programmer of FutureBook Live, said: "Netflix. Spotify. Amazon. The biggest players in the digital economy have one thing in common: a bank of locked-in subscribers offering a wealth of user data that can be used to lock them in ever more tightly. From print book boxes to all-you-can-read platforms, the book trade has been trying to get a piece of the action for a while—to mixed success. So are subscription and streaming models always going to be a niche option in an industry built on a long-form, high-effort, time-consuming product? Or are we finally, as Subscribed author Tien Tzuo recently told FutureBook, 'witnessing the end of ownership'?
"We’re bringing together the founder of two subscription book boxes, the entrepreneur behind a new unlimited cookbook app, a digital publisher, and the GM of a Silicon Valley subscription software firm to argue it out."
The full programme can be accessed here, and tickets can be bought here.
FutureBook Live takes place on 30th November in London, at 155 Bishopsgate.