Kindle Owners' Lending Library as a Subscription Service?

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Re: Kindles already being "Premium" Priced - yes and no.
Outside NorthAM where competitor volumes are low and prices high [...]

No, I was not talking about prices. I meant premium for support and their huge catalog.

re: Selling epubs - Folks who want Amazon to do epub usually want access to Amazon's Kindle ebook catalog at Kindle prices. But they also want it on non-Kindle hardware. And that just won't fly; Amazon is not going to spend money supporting a commpetitor which is what using Adept comes down to; paying Adobe fore something they already do on their own and do it better.

Yes I was thinking along the line of offering the Kindle ebook catalog to other hardware to grab even more customers. Did not occur to me that it would be such a huge investment for Amazon and at possibly no significant extra sales.

Maybe I just don't like Kindle on principal, only because I disliked how Amazon was trying to lock you into their books and nothing else when the very first Kindle came out. That there was lack of competition at that time (was it only 2007? seams they been around for a lot longer) did not apparently occur to me.

Now if Amazon comes out with a large screen color Kindle first, then I will probably go out and grab it - that is if I can convert other books to it and sideload them. A new Kindle DX with a 150+ ppi color eink screen would be really nice.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Yes I was thinking along the line of offering the Kindle ebook catalog to other hardware to grab even more customers. Did not occur to me that it would be such a huge investment for Amazon and at possibly no significant extra sales.

Maybe I just don't like Kindle on principal, only because I disliked how Amazon was trying to lock you into their books and nothing else when the very first Kindle came out. That there was lack of competition at that time (was it only 2007? seams they been around for a lot longer) did not apparently occur to me.

There actually was an entrenched competitor playing the exactly the same walled garden Model that Kindle launched with: Sony, with their proprietary LRF format. They had the name, the tech, and a one year lead on Kindle. Unlike Amazon, that stuck with their business model (if nothing else, to justify buying Mobileread) Sony switched to epub and promptly became just one of the Adobe-client state crowd.

As for lock-in, consider this: all the people buying the interoperable "open" Adobe DRM ebooks are just as locked-in to Adobe client readers as Kindle owners are locked-in to Amazon. So what's the difference? How is being locked-in to the product line of one giant multinational (adobe) all that different to being locked-in to the product line of another big multinational (amazon?).

[stonetools]

Well, let's fast forward to June 2012:

There are now over 100,000 titles in the Lending Library- a greater selection than most public libraries. Most of those titles are indies, but there are a handful of Big Six titles- mostly shorter works (Kindle Singles) and some backlist.
Amazon rolls out the new Kindle Subscriptions for Kindle owners. The plan is 49.99 for a year's subscription or 4.99 a month. For that, you get to check out a book a week. The hook is a book a buck. Maybe its bundled with video subscriptions for 80 per year.
Will this work? Hard to say, but I could see Amazon trying this.

[fjtorres]

Amazon is publicizing early returns to try to get more publishers on-board:
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-a...=Google+Reader