Amazon Is Testing a $10-Per-Month Ebook Service

Nate the greatest (2261802) writes "Details are still scarce but it looks like Amazon is going to be launching a competitor to Scribd and Oyster. Earlier today new pages leaked on the Amazon website which mentioned Kindle Unlimited, a new subscription ebook service. The pages were quickly removed, but not before we got some screenshots. If the screenshots are to be believed Kindle Unlimited is going to offer a catalog of over 600,000 titles for $9.99 a month. The news hasn't been confirmed by Amazon but those pages were seen by a number of authors and bloggers, including indie authors who confirmed that the new service is mentioned in their sales reports."

Comments

Subscription Everything

[cowtamer]

So for better or worse, everything is going to turn into a subscription service. You'll subscribe to read books, listen to music, stream movies, etc. Soon, we'll have grocery store subscriptions, subscriptions to hospitals (I think they're called HMOs), etc. I can imagine a furniture delivery & maintenance subscription too. At the end of the month, we'll probably see about $50 out of our paycheck -- which we won't even need to buy coffee, since we'll all have Starbucks subscriptions!!!

This will be great until, God forbid, the plug is pulled for some reason (unemployment, desire to take a couple of months off, etc.), at which point nobody will own anything...

Re:Subscription Everything

[gstoddart]

at which point nobody will own anything...

Why of course, that's the ultimate goal.

Why sell you something when we can endlessly rent it to you?

I will hold out from this model for as long as possible, because I don't give a shit about the profitability of these companies and their rent-seeking behavior.

Re:Subscription Everything

[BlackHawk-666]

The profit comes from the same place gym membership profits come from. People sign up, use it a couple of times, then forget about it, meanwhile - it ticks over every month pulling in money for nothing.

I am a mamber of a free

[geekoid]

eBook service called: The Library.
You should see if your library has an eBook lending service.

Seriously, if you don't want to own it, why wouldn't you use a library?
This also goes for movies and games.
Your library doesn't do this or have enough titles? get involved.

Re:No thank you.

[David_Hart]

I'm assuming that it will be the same books that are in the Kindle lending library. It's a feature of Amazon Prime where you can check out 1 book at a time (and only one new book per month). It's limited as it currently exists, but I assume when this feature hits, your Prime account will let you have one book out at a time with more than one swap per month.

Our family and friends share an Amazon account for Kindle books.

If the subscription service allows books to be installed on more than one Kindle (i.e. up to 5), then this might work for us. It would allow us to use the same account but have access to the full library. However, if it is limited to the lending library, does not have newer books, or does not allow multiple Kindles then I'll pass.

The ideal would be to to have a subscription service that allows multiple Kindles and has access to the full Kindle library. I'm willing to bet, though, that Publishers would only be willing to sign up for something like this if it is restricted to older books. They will still want the revenue from full priced new books.