Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
Amazon is already a go-to place for people who love to binge on shopping, TV shows, and music, thanks to its all-you-can-consume Amazon Prime service. And now, it seems, the company wants to lure binge readers too.
According to Gigaom, the e-commerce giant is working on a subscription ebook service called Kindle Unlimited, which would offer unlimited ebook rentals for $9.99 a month. It’s a move that’s very much aligned with where both the tech and the publishing industry are headed.
While Amazon has been slow to build it, enterprising startups have been more than happy to fill that gap.
We tech-savvy consumers have grown accustomed to the unlimited buffet. Pay Netflix or Hulu a flat fee, and we can binge on all the movies and TV shows we could ever want to watch. For music lovers, there’s Spotify. And yet, among the tech giants, Amazon’s Kindle book store, is one of the last a la carte menus left. Users either buy a book at a time or, at best, rent a book a month for free through the company’s Amazon Prime service. As the Netflix model has grown, it’s become increasingly obvious that there should be a “Netflix for books” too.
While Amazon has been slow to build it, enterprising startups have been more than happy to fill that gap. The New York City startup, Oyster, for one, has raised $17 million for its all-you-can-read app. Scribd, which started as a publishing platform for long Web documents, launched a similar service last year. Even some publishers have tried it.
Clearly, Amazon has been listening. Not only is this activity in the startup community proof that the model is becoming popular with readers, but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likely sees Kindle Unlimited as a lucrative revenue stream for Amazon. Right now, the company’s big moneymaker is Amazon Prime, which provides unlimited digital music, TV shows, and movies as well as unlimited shipping for physical goods—all at a cost of $99. Kindle Unlimited, by contrast, would cost users $120 a year, if the leaked price is right. Plus, it could also drive the sales of Kindle devices.
That said, Amazon may have to overcome one obstacle it’s not quite used to, and that is, competing with tiny startups. If Kindle Unlimited had launched last year, Oyster and Scribd might never had a chance of survival, as both companies were still building their libraries and striking deals with publishers. One year later, though, Oyster has partnerships with big names like Simon & Schuster, and more than 500,000 titles in its library. Screenshots of Kindle Unlimited’s test pages say the service offers 638,416 titles, not much more than Oyster. Plus, users don’t have to buy another device to get their books from Oyster. They can read them right from their phones.
No matter who wins the space, one thing is for sure: the publishing industry, already changed by the e-reader, is about to undergo another radical transformation.
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