You don’t talk about book club
According to a report in the WSJ, Amazon is looking into the possibility of creating a new subscription book service that would allow people to access an e-book library - effectively renting the books for as long as it takes to read them.
This model would be in keeping with music libraries such as Spotify, or video rental services like Netflix. End-users would sign up for an annual subscription, and Amazon would pay rights-holders themselves from the subscription money. Commercially it also doesn't sound a million miles away from what Apple is doing with iTunes Match.
But it looks like publishers are going to take some convincing. While doing the maths to see if this is worth their while, they have to take many factors into consideration. Firstly there's the cannibalisation of existing book sales - if, say, this service eats up half their e-book sales, will they be sufficiently compensated for this?
Also, says the report, there are concerns about how this would affect their relationships with other book retailers. And then there's the fact that it costs the publisher the same to deliver an e-book for rental as it does one that has been bought, so where's the benefit - especially if books become further commoditised as a result? The only advantage comes if many more people subscribe to this service than were previously buying books.
