Reason To Buy? A Sports Star Will Sell You His Book With A Page Made Out Of His Blood
from the hmm dept
Shirshendu Mandal was the first of a few of you to pass along this story of a superstar Indian cricket player, Sachin Tendulkar, who has written a book. And, in figuring out how to sell the book, he's doing an... odd sort of "tiering" option. You see there will be a special edition of the book, which costs merely $75,000... and for that price one of the pages will be made, in part, from his blood. And here's the thing: apparently ten people have already signed up for it. As we've noted when talking about various business models that content creators can use, often it really depends on the person themselves, and the relationship they have with their fans. In this case, it seems pretty clear that this is a rather... unique offering, that works for this guy's fans.
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Filed Under: blood, books, reasons to buy, sachin tendulkar
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This blood thing could be significant offering in a cultural context. So something that may seen bizarre to North Americans could be okay at other countries.
I think the main point is still valid. Reason to buy could be ANY working reason, although in this case it's a bit strange (to us).
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What.
What.
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Could be stranger...
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ITS the new necronomicon
it summons evil doers form hell like the riaa ceo or the labels of satan themselves of warner brothers, sony and the rest
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Kiss called
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Still, strange? Maybe. Free advertising and a reason to buy the first printing of the book instead of waiting for the paperback? Definitely.
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What bothers me about sports, and part of the reason why I don't watch them much, is the fact that they remain covered by copyright even after being aired. That's stupid because then the only people who can have the video 100 years later are those who recorded it while it was broadcasting, unless people can buy it from the store. But not every game will likely be sold at your local store, 100 year VHS tapes will likely have very distorted quality, and one would be hard pressed to find someone who recorded every game of a sport to find a specific game that many people talked about. The difficulty for future generations to watch past sporting games due to our broken laws distorts our history and the history of sports and that very much upsets me. It's not like the copy protection holder gains very much by having each game locked up even after the game has aired. Most of its monetary value occurs when it airs.
I would like to see the emergence of independent sporting leagues where the videos are released under a CC license. What laws stand in the way and where are these laws located (ie: city laws, state laws, etc...)? Perhaps more discussions of these laws could help build better organized future resistance against them and one day we can have sporting leagues where the videos are either not covered by copyright or are released under a CC license. Independent sports would be nice, people should quickly stop watching mainstream sports, seek independent sports with videos released under a CC license at least after the initial airing, and they should seek to correct any laws that stand in the way. We need to be more organized and better figure out specifically what laws make our lives more difficult and how.
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