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

No thank you.

[B33rNinj4]

I'll stick to either buying them, or getting shared copies from friends.

Re:No thank you.

[SQLGuru]

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.

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.

Re:No thank you.

[rossdee]

And Prime only costs $100 per year ($10 per month is $120 per year) and Prime gives you the free 2 day shipping and access to free Prime videos and music

I'll stick witht my existing Prime suscription.

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

[CastrTroy]

I think it's actually quite a good way to get your music/movies/tv shows/books. I think it make the least sense for music because music tends to have a lot of replay value. People will listen to the same song or album over and over again. But for books, movies, and fiction books, you might use them once, twice, maybe even 20 times, but most people are constantly watching/reading new stuff. There's very little point to having a collection of movies you've already seen, or a house full of books you've already read. If they can get the price right, then they stand to make more money, and the person consuming the content will have access to a much larger library then they could every hope to purchase on their own. They are also more likely to branch out and look at other genres they hadn't considered before because they don't have to spend extra money to do so. And for media, it doesn't really matter much if you stop paying the subscription because you lost your job. You just can't watch any movies until you get a job again. Which many people are probably OK with. If it means I could have access to all of (or a large subset of) the media produced, I'm much happier spending $10 a month to have access to everything than spending $10 a month to have only 1 new item every month.

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.

All hail Netboox!

[Applehu Akbar]

If this arrangement applied to all books in the Kindle format, with unlimited one-book-at-a-time availability, I would be on it like scales on lawyers.

Re:All hail Netboox!

[SQLGuru]

Do you have a Prime account? http://www.amazon.com/gp/featu...

The most annoying part about the Lending Library is that you can only swap out books once per month.

Re:All hail Netboox!

[Sechr Nibw]

Like I posted (at the same time as you, apparently!), it's worse than that. I have a Kindle device, but I have to read the book JUST on the Kindle, I can't switch to any of the alternate devices, which is something I do all the time when reading a book. Whether I'm at my desk (Kindle for Mac/Windows), on the bus (iPhone/iPad), or at home, reading before bed (Kindle PW), I want to be able to read the same book, which just doesn't work for the KOLL checkout system.

High useage

[gurps_npc]

I am a heavy reader and this would save me money.

But it would also mean I would have to give up paper and switch entirely to my e-reader, which I currently use for about 1/2 to 1/3 my purchasers. There are a lot of advantages still for paper books- charts, graphs and pictures for example do not show up well on ereaders. Nor do I worry about taking a paperback anyplace. I can take them on a camping/rafting trip.

It would also mean I would end up being locked into Amazon, not a good thing. I don't trust them as much as I trust Barnes and Nobles, as they have done vile things before (Hatchet, pulling back books people purchased)

Re:High useage

[radarskiy]

"Similarly, it makes zero sense to buy an ebook from B&N if it is available through this program."

If you *currently* have the subscription service then your *current* choice would be to not buy thorugh B&N. However, your *future* choices are not constrained if the terms of the service change unfavorable (since you can you just drop the service).

Since "constraint on future decisions" is what lock-in means, and there would be no constraint, there is no lock-in.

Depending on the selection, I'm probably in

[Overzeetop]

My wife goes through 8-12 novels a month, and often the more recent ones are either not available from the local library or are checked out/reserved, so we're spending $40 or more on new or used books that generally get given away when she's done with them. She almost never re-reads, so there's no real loss in the rental model for her.

So depending on what the selection is like, it might be worth it. Even more so if it's a per-family cost instead of a per-device, since my daughter seems to be trying her best to put B&N back in the black, esp. during summer months.

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:I am a mamber of a free

[gstoddart]

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

You joke, but my mother in law used to work at a local library. A very small local library with a very small budget.

At one point, they started getting into eBook lending. Because the publishers are greedy, the cost of an eBook to a library is huge -- in the hundreds if not thousands per title.

Basically what they used to do was go to book sales, used book stores and stuff like that, and buy a very large amount of titles for the library. It was inexpensive, and got them a lot of titles.

After the eBook thing, they had no budget for new paper books, and only about 100 eBook titles (or something equally ridiculous). Because they'd spent the entire budget on getting screwed over by publishers.

Unless you're a very well funded library, eBook lending is so prohibitively expensive that you almost have to give up your money to buy paper books for the library.

She couldn't retire fast enough, because she figured if they were spending the entire budget on a handful of eBooks, the library was pretty much screwed.

Me, I prefer to stick with my dead tree editions of books. I can sit by a pool reading Tom Clancy, battery life isn't an issue, water splashing isn't going to be a catastrophic failure, and some greedy bastard doesn't get to monetize my reading habits.

But I wouldn't think for a minute that eBooks and the like aren't actually damaging many libraries more than they benefit.

yeah it is a good thing for me (as an author)

[netsavior]

My DRM-free, Amazon hosted and sold ebooks already net me more revenue via "Kindle Lending Library" (where customers may pick one "free" book per month if they are prime and kindle customers) than they do via sales.

The way the lending library works is they fund it every month, then they divide it up based on how often your book was checked out. I assume the ebook service would be similar, but better funded.

Re:Make it $4.99 and epub, not mobi

[netsavior]

DRM is a publisher choice. It is a checkbox in the Amazon "publish my book" interface. All of my books sold through amazon are DRM free. If you want to know how to tell (since it is non-obvious)... under "product details" there is an item called "Simultaneous Device Usage" if that says "unlimited" it is DRM free.

Re:So... how is this any better than a library?

[radarskiy]

It's better because this is capitalism and libraries are damned dirty communism.

Re:Make it $4.99 and epub, not mobi

[CRCulver]

Question â" how would a lending library work without DRM? Subscribe for one month, download a thousand books, cancel, and keep the books?

That's pretty much how it already is with ebook libraries that use Amazon or Adobe's DRM solution. From discussions on pirate ebook communities, I've seen that it's already common for pirates to buy a temporary subscription to a service, download everything through some clever scripting, break the DRM, upload to a pirate site, and let their temporary subscription lapse. Considering how trivial it is to break the DRM on these books, it really is only the honour system keeping people paying.

Re:Make it $4.99 and epub, not mobi

[Sasayaki]

Kindle author here (and other platforms too).

The book is genuinely DRM free. The .mobi file format, which is what Amazon uses, is well documented by FOSS projects such as Calibre. You can transcode your DRM free .mobi files into .epub (which is just a .zip with HTML in it), into PDFs, Word documents, even plain text.

All of my books are DRM free for this reason (and many are also free-as-in-beer).