Are you a paying subscriber to Kindle Unlimited/Scribd/Oyster?

[fjtorres]

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.

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.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

It's automatic.
He should be getting an email early each month offering a choice of six titles.
I usually wait until late in the month to let reviews accumulate.

The program is called Kindle First.

Here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/custo...deId=201376210

One neglected aspect is that non-Prime members get to sign up for the newsletter and buy the books at a deep discount (typically $1.99). For Prime members the first is free but they can buy the others too.

I"m not prime, but yes, I did sign up for a while. Mostly not my genre so I unsigned up. I don't remember the prices, but they were cheaper than a normal book.

[Xianxia]

bumping this thread

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by Xianxia

bumping this thread

Why?

Sent from my XT1528

[Xianxia]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Why?

Sent from my XT1528

to see if the votes change

[Blossom]

You do realize Oyster is no longer? Your results are now not valid as this thread is very old. If you want I can close this thread and you can make a new poll for more accurate data.

Sent from my Nexus 7