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Pandora is losing money. They lost $16 million, on $250 million in revenues for FY2012.
Spotify lost money in 2011, $56 million on $244 million in revenues and perhaps 5 million paid subscribers.
As a commercial service, Napster tanked and had to merge with Rhapsody.
Rhapsody might be eking out a $1 million profit, on $125 million in revenues and roughly 1 million users.
Nielson's annual study of the music business indicated that people are using subscription models more, but are also "stubbornly" hanging onto the idea of owning music. Even people who use music subscription services frequently purchase tracks.
Music and movies also differ significantly from books in a critical aspect: Time. A song takes 3-5 minutes to experience; a TV show takes an hour; a movie takes 2 hours or less. A book can take days, if not weeks, for someone to read. So you can pay Netflix $10 a month to watch dozens of shows, or you can pay "Bookify" $10 a month to read one book.
For people who read large numbers of books, it makes sense for the consumer -- but not for the service. The more ebooks they provide to a subscriber in a given month, the less profit they make from that customer.
Amazon Prime works only because Amazon is willing to take a loss on it, in exchange for drawing people into the Kindle system.
One option that might work is a textbook service. You pay X per semester, and can check out ebooks from your school's curriculum for that semester.
Otherwise, I'd say the economics don't look good for ebook subscription services.
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