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Amazon To Launch Digital Book Rental Service

Posted by samzenpus on from the this-book-will-self-destruct dept.

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.'"

6 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Digital Book.... renting? by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Digital Book.... renting? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Scarcity was not viewed as a problem by the people who published books. They are not in business because they want to spread knowledge or enable learning, they are in business to make money. Thus, the elimination of scarcity is actually viewed as a bad thing, and they want to prop up the scarcity with the law.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    2. Re:Digital Book.... renting? by bws111 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I wasn't aware of the fact that we had eliminated the scarcity of authors who write things we want to read. When did that happen?

    3. Re:Digital Book.... renting? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Artificial scarcity or not, people still like to get paid for work they do.

    4. Re:Digital Book.... renting? by bws111 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You missed the 'we want to read' part. Further, how are we creating artificial scarcity of blogs and "the google"? The simple fact is, if you are content with the stuff you find on blogs and "the google", you can have as much of that as you want today. There is no scarcity. However, many people want professionally made stuff, and professionals want to be paid, and the 'artificial scarcity' is how we pay them.

  2. Re:Supported devices by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Given that their present "Kindle" service is available as a hardware device, an iOS application, an Android application, a WinXP/Vista/7 program, an OSX program, a blackberry application, and a webapp supporting some webkit browsers(I think that there might even have been a WebOS beta at some point...), I'm guessing that Amazon isn't planning on a hardware exclusivity play...

    It is conceivable that publisher freak-outery might demand more DRM; but I'd suspect that(just as Netflix recently relaxed from "Select Android devices with special DRM sauce" to "Android, why the fuck would you pirate the shitty stream on your cellphone, not the Blu-ray rips already on bittorrent, anyway?") any publisher who doesn't run screaming at the very thought of this will accept that dedicated cheapskates are probably beyond capture anyway, and it basically comes down to whether they'd prefer a reliable revenue stream from their readers, or a riskier; but potentially larger, one...