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Originally Posted by stonetools
Of course , before a successful movie rental model was established, there wasn't a movie rental business.
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Sure there was--you just had to rent use of theater space at the same time. Movies had a long history of "pay to view this once, in a time & place of our choosing." While books have occasionally had pay-per-month libraries, and romance publishers in particular have managed subscription models (and kept prices low because of them), there's never been a widespread "pay to access this a limited number of times" model for books.
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We just don't have the right model right. We know people are willing to borrow books for a while: there's no reason in principle why they wouldn't borrow books for a fee if they could borrow any book they liked, anytime they liked, rather than just the collection available at their local library.
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Well, sure, if you can offer that... how would you expect to offer "any book they like?" Rowling doesn't want her books available as ebooks. The Perry Mason novels are stuck in copyright limbo. Textbook publishers want 2/3 of the print price for a 4-month rental. Two of the Agency 6 companies don't currently release anything digital to libraries.
I can think of two movies, off the top of my head, that I have on VCR but don't exist digitally, and three more that I want but have never been released on tape; I can list hundreds of books that don't have digital formats. And a lot of publishers don't want to license books to be loaned out; they tolerate physical libraries because they can't stop them, but they refuse to accept any distribution system that isn't "one user, one payment."
The majority of the Agency 6 ebooks can't be loaned one time, to one person, for two weeks; what makes you think they'd be willing to accept a few pennies per reader on a subscription plan? (Any cost more than "a few cents per book--maybe a dollar per book" is going to fall flat. I don't pay an average of a dollar per book now, and I already have more to read than I can keep up with.)
I like Shatzkin's article, but I think he's got the pricing wrong; I think more than $20/month is a recipe for failure. Or maybe success for a tiny book club, but it won't sweep the internet as the new economic model.
If we can pay less $10/month for all the movies we can watch, why would we pay five times that much for a much more limited range of content? And badly-formatted content as well?