Quote:
Originally Posted by AbFabGab
I wonder if something like this could be turned into a
workable model for ebooks? like some type of membership
site where you could download so much per month...
hmmm...
Very interesting, I like the idea.  |
O'Reilly's "Safari Bookshelf" (no relation to the Apple web browser) functions roughly like this. You have a limited number of bookshelf "slots" and you can swap out books so that you can only have so many checked out at a time. It also regulates the frequency of your swapping. I forget the time frames. We used to have a department account at work. It fell into disuse because people kept buying paper versions anyway. Sadly, I was just looking at the Bookshelf earlier today and while you can buy books a la carte in a wide number of ebook formats, the Safari Bookshelf is a little more DRM-dependent, so they only do PDF.
To answer the question about why more books aren't available, my only guess would be Intellectual Property issues. Publishers are very concerned that books are distributed in such a way that reliably improves their bottom lines and doesn't put their works at risk of piracy.
While it might seem easy to make an online store (seems like any high schooler can whip up an AJAX shopping cart in a single evening these days, no?), making one that's very secure, reliable, and can scale with high load and a massive amount of content is exponentially more difficult. Many publishers just aren't equipped to produce a service like that, and they probably have a hard time trusting someone else to do it for them. It was like this in the music industry until Apple rolled along. iTunes' Music Store succeeded partly because Apple made a great platform for music sales (being a top-notch tech company, they had the cahones and means to do this), and partly because they were just great salespeople, and were able to address the music industry's concerns and make them feel comfortable enough to hop onboard.