Quote:
Originally Posted by Xianxia
Only silence from Apple and Google, I thought they would be in the game by now.
Kindle Unlimited debuted 2 years ago.
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That is a game they aren't interested in. eBook sales at 30% are already pretty low on their priorities so why should they much care about lower margin/lower volume subscriptions? It's a niche within a niche.
Amazon can count on something like 50M ebook buyers and probably no more than 2M KU subscribers. That's about a 3-4% rate. Apple sells at most a fifth the ebooks Amazon sells so they seem to have the equivalent of maybe 10M Kindle buyers. 4% of that would be less than half a million and gross maybe $60m a year. That is pocket lint to Apple.
And Google... Goggle barely registers in sales at under 2% or about one fortieth of Amazon. That projects to maybe 50,000 subscribers and $6M a year.
Another way to look at it is that subscriptions strongest appeal is to heavy readers, the kind of people to whom ereaders make the most economic sense. Neither Apple nor Google have dedicated readers so their customer base skews more heavily towards casual readers buying a book or three a year than Amazon's customer base. So, realistically, their subscriber base would likely be proportionally smaller than Amazon's.
Finally, KU works for Amazon as a marketing tool to attract Indies, which means the books they carry are cheaper and Indies are willing to pay for the added visibility by accepting exclusivity and lower payouts. Neither Apple nor Google can easily match that visibility or are big enough in Indie sales to get Indies to forgo KU which already pays out more than Nook, Kobo, or Google gross in sales.
So any subscription service by Apple and Google would have to pay more than KU and we saw how well that played out for Oyster.
There are actually a few "successful" subscription services in Europe, mostly run by small startups. The operative word being *small*. If you look at their efforts you find they run in the 10-30,000 subscriber range. Figure a gross of around US$3M a year. Enough to keep a small company afloat but hardly of interest to the big boys. And in those immature ebook sale markets prospects for growth aren't all that hot.
There simply isn't all that much money to be found in subscriptions and for now the bulk of it is flowing to KU.