Slashdot Mirror
Amazon To Launch Digital Book Rental Service
First time accepted submitter ni5dotcom writes "Amazon is soon going to launch an e-book rental service soon for US customers, according to The Wall Street Journal. Publishers, however, have shown mixed reaction to this decision so far. From the article: 'Amazon is believed to have offered book publishers a large fee for joining the service. However, the negotiations are said to still be in their early stages. The Seattle-based technology company, which is expected to imminently launch a tablet device to rival Apple’s iPad, has also said that the digital ebook library would feature older titles and be accessible to those who pay for $79 a year for Amazon Prime, the service which allows people unlimited two-day shipping and films and TV shows on demand.'"
I hope that this service is backwards compatible with their existing Kindle devices, making it Amazon Tablet (aPad?) only is going to anger their existing customer base...
It's ironic that as a society we were able to completely eliminate scarcity for things like books, music and movies and then we turned around and tacked on an artificial scarcity model on top of it.
I'm curious to know what benefits I will receive for $79 a year vs. using the upcoming Kindle Library Lending that will be available for free in a few months. I don't buy that much *stuff* from Amazon, so free two day shipping and rental movies is not much of a benefit.
One US publishing executive told The Wall Street Journal: “What it [the digital book rental service] would do is downgrade the value of the book business.”
In other news, libraries exist.
The whole concept is absurd. Renting made sense when the medium was difficult or expensive to duplicate and distribute. Bits are essentially free to duplicate and distribute. It makes no sense at all.
has also said that the digital ebook library would feature older titles
If I wanted an old book, why not download it legally or otherwise? To subscribe I have to play games comparing the average price of a years worth of downloads to the annual price of the service. Also I'd feel locked in to only reading stuff from the paid service to maximize my "profit" rather than reading what I actually want to read.
I'd rather subscribe to a (new) book of the month club. They already have subscription infrastructure, it would all be marketing. Simply offer "Baen New Releases Magazine" for perhaps $5/month and I'm in. More than publishers and marketers, I would like to pay money to subscribe to a favored author, or perhaps a themed trusted editor ("Lovecraftian Subscription", or whatever). Nathan Lowell here's a buck a month, now write me a new book. Or John Ringo or whoever.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Amazon Prime might be worth it if Amazon Video were available on my 360/PS3 (or even on a Roku box). But, AFAIK, it's only available through a browser or Tivo. Does anyone know if they have any plans to bring this to consoles, blu-ray players, etc. like Netflix Streaming?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Here in Toronto at least, you can take e-books out of your public library. No yearly fees (yet).
So it's like a library, but you pay for it?
I know, I know, libraries are paid for with taxes and their various fundraisers, but that's because they have physical buildings to maintain in addition to the books. Unless this service is pennies a week, it's gonna be a ripoff. Their distribution costs are negligible (text files of books are what, a few kB?), inventory control is practically free because there's no such thing as a lost book, and they can send out as many copies as necessary instead of waiting for one patron to return one after they're done. The only cost to them is the book rights in the first place.
The interesting thing about this is that anyone can see book rentals are going to cut into book sales. It's doubtful that people will read more simply because a rental service is available -- for me and most people I know the limiting factors on the amount they read are time, energy, and interest, not the cost of books. Therefore Amazon could be viewed as undercutting its own book-sales business with this service, providing rentals of books to their most active customers who would normally buy them. Why? I can only speculate, but surely this is a bold and disruptive move in the publishing business.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
The library down the street used to do this for free. -www.awkwardengineer.com
It is going to be part of your Prime membership, as yet another value add. And $79 / year is in fact "pennies a day".
Originally, Amazon prime only gave you free unlimited 2 day shipping. Now it gives you that, plus free unlimited streaming of TV and movies. Now, they are going to add unlimited book rentals as well.
If you are an existing Prime customer, this is nothing but a good thing. If you are not, this is yet another way for Amazon to get you into Prime.
It's actually a very smart move, vs. making a stand-alone service.
This sounds a bit like they are going for out-of-copyright stuff in the first place. So why not just get these books from Project Gutenberg?
Also many public libraries (e.g., The New York Public Library) offer ebooks via a DRM-enforced lending mechanism using "Adobe Digital Editions" software. I download the ebook to my PC then copy it via ADE to my Nook. They currently have only about 13,000 ebooks of this sort (not counting copyright-free stuff that they also make available through NYPL).
I have not found a source of free current technical ebooks though, other than papers and documentation provided in PDF format (which Calibre can convert to a format more suitable for a portable ereader, given that most of them don't handle PDF as well as they do other formats like ePub).
Most still contain DRM, so you don't own them even if you pay for them.
Artificial scarcity or not, people still like to get paid for work they do.
Stop it. You are making too much sense, which is anathema in /.
I hope that this service is backwards compatible with their existing Kindle devices, making it Amazon Tablet (aPad?) only is going to anger their existing customer base...
Would it not? Amazon provides not just the kindle hardware, but also software-base readers for Windows, iOS, Android and BlackBerry that you can register as your own additional devices. Just yesterday I *pushed* all my kindle books to my newly bought Vizio tablet (which is not a top of the line tablet mind you)... all that done from my Amazon Kindle account.
Amazon has been tentatively made several books available for rental, for example, Li & Yao's "Real-Time Concepts for Embedded Systems", for a bit less than half the full price for a 30-day rental. Not bad I'd say (for those with the discipline to go through what's needed off such a book rental in 30 days.) http://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Concepts-Embedded-Systems-ebook/dp/B003VM7GK6/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1315840111&sr=8-1 So the concept works now in both hardware and software-based Kindle readers using existing Kindle services. Making the concept widespread doesn't alter that, so I don't know what the FUD this is all about.
Last week (out of pure curiosity) I downloaded relatively small torrent that contained text docs of every single star trek novel. I thought to myself, wow, this is amazing. How is the publishing industry ever going to stop this? One blueray disk that costs $1 is large enough to contain the top 500,000 ebooks, which is virtually all of them really. Three or four blu-ray disks would hold every title Amazon sells. Don't we need to rethink commerce? Why would anyone rent a digital copy if the alternatives are so much simpler?
Amazon is soon going to launch an e-book rental service soon for US customers. Simultaneously they're launching a hack-my-service competition in the rest of the world.
Fixed that for you.
What'd be the real life, real technology meaning of an e-rental?
I get I file that I later need to delete when the rental expires?
Smart! Very smart indeed!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
...Digital camera, photo shots of the screen to compressed JPEG images, posted on the 'net (l33k3d).
"Piracy is the result of Amazon," the pundits will say.
The days of everyone getting hunted down for posting anything and everything to the 'net that may have ANY potentially copyrighted component will be prosecuted. People will be sued for posting pictures of someone in a family shot that was walking down the street at the time. The company's logo that is in the shot will also sue.
The days of DMCA-like over-enforcement will ensue. Repeat process all over again.
This sounds a bit like they are going for out-of-copyright stuff in the first place. So why not just get these books from Project Gutenberg?
Shhhhhhhhh! Don't tell people how to get around their idiot-driven model. :>
Most county libraries offer to 'rent out books'. After the book is d/l, I really don't understand the 'shortage' of the book.I think the whole concept of a 'book' needs to rethought.
The first, and probably largest, is where people are regularly buying new (fictional) books to read for pleasure, and after they are finished with them,they sell or give them away to somebody else, or otherwise discard them.
The second case is for college or university students who might need a particular book for one course they are taking, but are not likely to need to utilize the book afterwards. Obviously, for some courses, especially the ones that are directly in a person's primary field, permanent copies are probably going to want to retained, but for courses outside one's chosen discipline, that are often part of a breadth requirement for getting a degree, it is easily conceivable that books might be needed for the course that a person would never have any reason to look at again after the course was completed. If renting is sufficiently less expensive than buying, I can see this being *VERY* profitable for school bookstores, because they can effectively cut out a significant amount of competition by the used book market.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Just wanted to point out that there current business is already a rental business. With DRM like theirs, you never really truly own a digital ebook anyway so you were largely buying a rental term of indefinite, all they are doing now is shortening that term and charging a little less.
Ever been to an all you can eat restaurant? Ever hear of one with a Michelin Star? The food is crap because it's whatever they can make cheaply. That's the direction entertainment is heading. The providers love the model because if they can get even a percentage of the population to sign up they make billions. Users like it because it's cheap entertainment. Who does it harm? The content creators. Suddenly the pie gets smaller so they make less. Their only solution is to make cheaper content so quality drops like a rock. In the end the average person suffers because quality suffers. We've already seen something like this if you don't believe me. Watch network TV lately? I don't. It's virtually all reality TV. Why? The can make reality shows for a tenth what they can scripted dramas and other forms. They didn't do it for creative reasons they did it because of dropping ad revenues. If all you can eat services become the norm you'll see the same happen with books, movies and music. They'll have to cut costs to compete and they won't cut executives wages they'll cut quality. In the end most of the publishers will cave in. Slashdot will declare it a victory and most posters will complain about the quality of the books on the all you can eat services. Predicting the future is easy when you know all the facts.
Neil Gaiman has given away for free
American Gods – PDFs - It was a limited time thing.
Graveyard Book – YouTube of him reading the entire thing.
OK – this is kind of the expectation proving the rule
From my experience, the older titles I've gotten from Amazon have been hastily OCRed and not proofread, I'm assuming to give Amazon a back catalog or books to intially entice people to buy their Kindles for. It worked on me, at least initially, but I had to train myself to substitute common OCR errors in my head as I was reading. It was a wholly unpleasant experience and wrecked my concentration. I went back to buying actual books, which has been better - I spend 8+ hours a day in front of a computer screen at work, let alone any home computer or screen-related downtime. If I pick up something to read, I want a BOOK - I want an interface I don't even have to think about, and readers feel too much like work to me.
My point being, Amazon leaning on their extensive library of "older" titles is a bit of a letdown. The quality just isn't up to par.
My daughter's college now rents as well as sells many of its books for courses. My first reaction to this article was that it would be a great benefit to students (and their parents!) if you could rent a e-textbook from Amazon for the length of a semester. As you say, some books are worth purchasing even at the ridiculous prices now charged for textbooks. We bought her organic chemistry textbook for that reason. But there are lots of books that students will only need for at most a few months. Renting e-books makes a lot of sense for students, especially since the problems of wear and tear would be eliminated.
Has anyone else checked out Safari Books Online from O'Reilly?
They let you read almost anything, any time. They are limited to technical and geek happy (but non-technical) books, but the selection feels complete.
It causes me to read more and learn new topics sooner.
Perhaps this Amazon feature will cause the same in their customers.