Amazon in talks to launch digital book library -WSJ

[stonetools]

From the link:

Publishers of these books are not really happy about the idea. "Publishers are going to be very reticent to assign a value of zero to their products," said Peter Kafka on the WSJ's Digits show. "They don't want to convey the idea that their products are worth nothing."

That's why the first deals that would be ironed out will likely be for older books in publishers' portfolios, instead of bestsellers that are currently only in hardcover like George R. R. Martin's Dance with Dragons or still profitable for a certain audience like the Hunger Games or Twilight series. Stephen King's latest masterpiece might not be free in this service, but Richard Bachman's might.

My guess is that the books available for download under this deal will be the same freebies offered over on the Freebies forum. That's not much of a deal-"You can download without limit from a pool of books that nobody wants to pay money for. Knock yourself out."

I'd much rather see a paid subscription option for books that might actually be desirable. Maybe this deal will be a step in that direction.

[DianNC]

Originally Posted by gojisube

Like this?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dwig/5454224618/

Persactly!!! Except....different lol.

[Crusader]

I think publishers would much rather opt for a subscription model like Angry Robot has done where you pay $XX and get all the books released by that imprint for a year. Which basically amounts to a deep discount per title.

[Japes]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Not quite free. Property taxes generally pay for library books.

Yes, but, you are paying those anyway (whether or not you actually use the library), so, for all intents and purposes, checking books out of the library is free.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Japes

Yes, but, you are paying those anyway (whether or not you actually use the library), so, for all intents and purposes, checking books out of the library is free.

But if nobody goes to libraries, they lose funding and the tax money goes somewhere else.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by Japes

Yes, but, you are paying those anyway (whether or not you actually use the library), so, for all intents and purposes, checking books out of the library is free.

In our case, it was a bond measure we voted on to pay a supplemental to our property taxes-well worth it in our case, as the new library is beautiful, and now has ebooks as well.

[CleverClothe]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I was told that this would NEVER work, because people would never "rent" books, which were special in a way that movies are not, etc. I even called which company would do it first:

Tooting a little early my friend.

1. It hasn't happened yet.
2. It hasn't succeeded yet.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by CleverClothe

Tooting a little early my friend.

1. It hasn't happened yet.
2. It hasn't succeeded yet.

WEll, you might be right. Stay tuned.

[Elfwreck]

The Copylaw blog has a nice outline of the possible kinds of subscriptions, based on other digital subscription services: Amazon Subscription Service Will Rewrite Book Contracts

* Unlimited content model
o In exchange for a periodic fee, the subscriber receives access via streaming to unlimited content.
o Examples

+ Netflix[i]: Unlimited on-demand streaming of movies and television shows for $8/month.
+ Rhapsody[ii]: Unlimited on-demand streaming of music for $10/month.
+ Sesame Street[iii]: Unlimited e-books accessed via a computer or “widget” for $4/month.
+ Disney Digital Books[iv]: Unlimited e-books accessed via a computer or iPad app for $9/month or $80/year.

...
# Bundled content model
* In exchange for a periodic fee, the subscriber receives a pre-determined number of downloads which become the member’s to keep.
* Examples

o Audible[v]: 1 downloaded audiobook per month for $15/month or 12 downloaded audiobooks per year for $150/year; 2 downloaded audiobooks per month for $23/month or 24 downloaded audiobooks per year for $230/year.

...
# Hybrid model
* Combination of unlimited online content and either a limited number of downloads or discounted downloads.
* Examples

o Napster[vi]: Unlimited on-demand streaming music on computer and home theater devices for $4-5 per month (depending on length of commitment); adding streaming on mobile devices doubles the price. With the mobile plan, the member can save up to 100 songs on their phone for off-line listening (access to the saved songs is discontinued if the plan is cancelled).
o Safari Books[vii]: Online access to 10 books per month for $23/month or $253/year; or unlimited e-books access via a computer for $43/month or $473/year. Members also get 5 download tokens per month which can be used to download PDF versions of books.

[OtterBooks]

I don't see how it could work. Then again, I don't really understand how lots of things work.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by OtterBooks

I don't see how it could work. Then again, I don't really understand how lots of things work.

I don't see any way the prices could be set that publishers would put up with, and readers would still pay in enough numbers to make it worth hosting the service.

And there's another nightmare: contracts. Publisher contracts with authors are for sales of books. Rentals or paid-for licensed uses, if they're mentioned at all, would be in a different area of the contract, and have a different royalty rate. Every book's contract would have to be considered before a publisher could put it on the list of available books.

Some small publishers with near enough to identical contracts could sign their entire line up; the big publishers, with thousands of drastically different contracts, would need to check each contract for compatibility and financial viability with the service.

Music has long been governed by the RIAA, which had a method for royalties for "streaming" content on the radio; movie contracts also had systems built in for both free & paid broadcast. Figuring out how to split the differences between movie house royalties, HBO royalties and broadcast-network-tv royalties was a matter of accounting skills, not rewriting the whole contract. Most books (maybe all books, up until now) don't have a "broadcast royalties" section in the contract.

I don't think it's an impossible idea, but I don't think it's going to be as simple as "publishers & Amazon get together to provide $10/month ebook access."

[stonetools]

Publishers like subscription models, because you get that steady stream of income that automatically gets paid out over time. Consumers like subscriotions if they get the same thing for less than the newsstand price. Thereby hangs the possibilty of a business model.
I might add that exactly the same objections were made to the idea of rental and subscription models for movies, and contracts had to be written or rewritten there too.
Now , we take movie rentals and streaming video options for granted.

THe same writer EW referenced wrote the following:

I've never been one to shy away from predicting the future. If asked, I’d say in the next 24-months, Amazon's Cloud Drive, their controversial cloud based digital music locker, announced on March 29, 2011, will evolve into a book service, with revenue generated by purchases, advertising and subscription revenue. Lockers and "lock in" are good for digital businesses that are having difficulty figuring out how to sustain a business based on piracy prone digital downloads. Amazon, as a player in the music space, knows that only 16.5% of American internet users over the age of 13 purchased music in the third quarter of 2010. If purchasing digital content is optional today, how do you make it worth someone's while to buy a down loadable book that is otherwise available on a torrent site? The answer the music industry has come up with is convenience, quality and legal.

LINK

You should RTWT.

That guy knows his stuff, IMO.

[Ben Thornton]

I'd certainly agree on the convenience front - I buy almost exclusively from Amazon now, mainly for that reason. Other devices are better in various ways, other ebook formats are better, but the important thing for me is to be able to get at the content, with the minimum hassle. Having to read within their time limit, or having to read only when online would destroy that convenience for me, so I don't think that they are likely to come up with a rental service that satisfies both my needs for convenience, and the publishers demands for security. Still - I hope I'm wrong!

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I might add that exactly the same objections were made to the idea of rental and subscription models for movies, and contracts had to be written or rewritten there too.

Movies have had, for many years, a provision for royalties for broadcast; adapting that to paid-subscription broadcast instead of open-public broadcast is a lot simpler than creating a provision for broadcast from scratch.

Especially given the bad accounting and rights grabs and bizarre royalty change demands that publishers are often prone to; authors have little incentive to just agree to whatever terms publishers suggest for subscriptions.

It's not an impossible situation--everyone would like ebook subscriptions to be available, and that's a strong motivator to find terms that authors, publishers, distributors and readers all agree to--but it's an entirely *new* economic and technological model in an industry that's known for "this is how it's always been done" contracts and digging in its heels to avoid new technology for as long as it possibly can.

The hard limits:
Readers will pay maybe $10-15/month for content. Whether that's a limited pool ("up to three books per month for $10/month") or an unlimited all-you-can-read from the basic catalog, or some kind of crossover, doesn't matter. The sweet spot for subscribe-to-entertainment is between $5 and $20 a month, and for $20 they'd have to provide a side of dancing boys and chats with pornstars. Which some MMORPGs can offer; ebook publishers can't.

The service provider--Amazon, in this hypothetical case--is going to insist on a percentage, quite likely a substantial one like 25% of every subscription. More, if they think the software is going to take real time to create & maintain. Author fees & publisher profits have to come out of what's left.

Someone has to pay for customer service, because (1) all software has the occasional glitch or bug and (2) some customers are idiots, and it doesn't matter whether the customer utterly failed to follow basic instructions; bad PR from idiot customers is just as damaging to future sales as bad PR from customers who were paying attention. So customer service will have to accept a certain level of "oops, I didn't mean to click that button; uncharge me for that" and "whaddaya mean, it now only works on my cousin's iPhone? No! I was just showing her how it worked, not signing her up! Fix it!" They'll also need to deal with actual tech problems--server hiccups causing lost books/deleted registrations, outages resulting in irate customers (who will not care if the contract terms allow that; they won't *renew* if they're not getting what they want to pay for), and of course, poorly-formatted books.

Authors are going to want to being paid for every reader who reads their books, not an amorphous percentage-of-subscriptions. (Whether they can insist on this is a separate issue; they'll at least make noise about it.) Some authors will refuse to go along with the game, and if they're influential enough, the whole thing could be scuttled.

Publishers are going to scream about the importance of DRM. Most readers won't care--but those who can't read the way they want to, won't subscribe. While the number of cloud-based devices is going up, I don't think it's high enough yet to support a business model that's going to have a high number of technical & legal setup problems. (Notice how Apple is *not* releasing any iBookstore sales numbers?)

I like the idea of ebook subscriptions; I don't see a way to make it work like Netflix or Pandora.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by Ben Thornton

I'd certainly agree on the convenience front - I buy almost exclusively from Amazon now, mainly for that reason. Other devices are better in various ways, other ebook formats are better, but the important thing for me is to be able to get at the content, with the minimum hassle. Having to read within their time limit, or having to read only when online would destroy that convenience for me, so I don't think that they are likely to come up with a rental service that satisfies both my needs for convenience, and the publishers demands for security. Still - I hope I'm wrong!

If you've ever rented a movie from iTunes or watched a movie from the Netflix streaming service, or listened to streaming music from Pandora or Spotify, you'll find that these consumer experiences are quite enjoyable and very convenient. Generally, when people raise objections to this idea, they bring up boundary situations like "Suppose I have to go hiking in the wilderness or be on safari in deepest Africa, then how will I get to stream my ebooks."
Of course, 90 per cent of the time, people do their reading at home , where wifi is handy. For when you have to go on the road, download and buy or rent options will still be available.
Also , too, with the latest iteration of HTML, you can start reading online and continue reading offline if you so choose .

AS for time limits, if you have ever borrowed books from the library, you have dealt with this issue. You just renew the books if you aren't finished. Of course, in a for-payment rental scheme, it will cost you. You'll have to decide whether you should just go ahead and buy that 1000 page blockbuster for $14.99 or rent it, knowing you might have to pay for two or more rental periods to complete it.