Quote:
Originally Posted by OtterBooks
I don't see how it could work. Then again, I don't really understand how lots of things work.
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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."