Amazon already dominates book sales, whether they be paper or digital. It also has a very firm grasp on the e-reader market with millions of Kindles already sold. But Amazon is apparently not satisfied with just selling digital books to Kindle owners, it wants to offer a subscription service for them too.
If you use Netflix to stream videos for a monthly fee, Amazon believes you’ll pay a subscription to gain access to a large library of digital books too. The e-tailer is thought to be in talks with several book publishers trying to sign them up to such a service.
In return for paying each publisher a healthy fee, Amazon would be able to offer access to potentially thousands of titles as part of a rental/download service. Users would pay a monthly subscription for the privilege of access, or potentially it could form part of the existing Amazon Prime $79/year service.
This isn’t a new idea, and it’s one publisher O’Reilly is already seeing a lot of success with through its Safari Books Online service. However, Safari is aimed squarely at the technology market and costs either $27.99 or $42.99 per month depending on your level of access. I’d expect Amazon would have to be a lot cheaper, closer to Netflix pricing in fact, if such a subscription service was to take off.
More at WSJ, via TNW
Matthew’s Opinion
As a Kindle owner I do find that the price of Kindle editions is on the high side for the books I want. I’m sure this is more down to the publisher than it is Amazon who would happily sell digital books cheaper if it meant higher sales and more revenue.
With that in mind, I would definitely consider a subscription service if it was priced like Netflix and offered up access to all Kindle books. That second prerequisite is key. I don’t believe such a service would work if you could only access some books. It also wouldn’t work if new releases aren’t included, unless of course they could be purchased at a discount or arrived on the service within say, a month of the release.
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