Subscription Services for E-Books: Like Netflix, Like Spotify, or Not at All?

Monthly "all you can eat" subscription services are now mainstream for music, movies, and TV.  Will they be as popular for e-books as well?  A move made recently by New York-based startup Oyster casts some doubt on this.  Oyster recently launched a traditional e-book retail feature, which complements the $10/month subscription e-book service that the company first launched over a year and a half ago.

Subscription e-book services are currently in a "chicken and egg" period of initial growth.  On the one hand, they are a totally new way of consuming books, just as subscription services were a totally new way of consuming music when they were first introduced in the early 2000s.  On the other hand, the major trade publishers are not embracing the model as enthusiastically as the major record labels did, even though subscription music services are now firmly in the mainstream.

Subscription music services came into being in the very early days of digital music.  Two services, MusicNet and pressplay, launched in late 2001.  Each had music from three of the five major record companies at the time (EMI licensed its material to both services).  In the middle of the following year, the startup Listen.com was able to get music from all five majors for its Rhapsody service.  In other words, it took less than a year for on-demand music services to attract all of the major record labels.

The story with subscription on-demand video services was quite different.   Netflix started its online video service in 2007 with a small catalog of non-major-studio film titles; it took Netflix five years to get recent releases from major studios.  Even now, Netflix (as well as Hulu and other similar services) is often criticized for the lack of depth in its catalog.

Subscription e-book services look to be shaping up more along the lines of Netflix than Rhapsody or Spotify.  There are currently three subscription e-book services available in the U.S. market: in addition to Oyster's, there are Scribd and Amazon's Kindle Unlimited.  Scribd and Oyster both have titles from three of the five major trade book publishers (HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster, but not Penguin Random House or Hachette).  And of those three publishers, the services only have "backlist" catalog, typically meaning titles that are a least a year old.  Reflecting the often testy relationship between Amazon and the major publishers, Kindle Unlimited offers no major-publisher titles at all.

Scribd is considerably older than Oyster.  It started in 2007 as sort of a "YouTube for documents," then added a retail store in 2009.  Anyone could put their documents up for sale on the site; it also began to attract commercial book publishers, starting with Simon & Schuster later that year.  Scribd launched its subscription offering in October 2013 with support from HarperCollins, just weeks after the launch of Oyster.  Scribd has stated that the subscription service is much more popular than its a-la-carte store, which is why it markets the subscription service more heavily.

Yet Oyster's new Ebook Store offers e-books from all five major trade publishers as well as hundreds of smaller publishers.  Why did Oyster add traditional retail to its subscription service?  Is Oyster's subscribership perhaps not growing as quickly as the company (or its investors, including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund) would like?  Is this a strategic "pivot"?

None of these companies publish subscriber figures, and indeed it's too early to draw any long-term conclusions.  It's also important to take into consideration the fact that book publishers behave more like movie studios than like record labels when it comes to the practice of "windowing."  Major film studios don't make movies available for home (through services like Netflix, on DVD or Blu-ray, etc.) use until months after their theatrical release.  Record labels have no such policies (though some would like to).  Trade book publishers do typically engage in a kind of windowing by publishing books in more expensive hardcover first and then, months later (if at all), in cheaper paperback.  Therefore the notion of not making "frontlist" titles available via certain e-book services should come naturally to book publishers.

Still, the fact that two of the major trade publishers are not licensing their titles to any subscription e-book services tells a story about publishers' reluctance to embrace the subscription market.  This is in line with the major publishers' behavior towards e-book startups: the majors have never been known to make their titles available to new startups without significant audiences.  Instead, they wait for startups to accumulate audiences through user-generated or indie-publisher content, then they jump on board.  That was certainly the case for Scribd, which had accumulated 80 million visitors when HarperCollins signed onto its subscription service.

But the question remains of whether consumers are interested in the "grazing" model of media consumption that all-you-can-eat on-demand services facilitate.  It's clear by now that a significant segment of the Internet population likes that model for music, despite the rising interest in music ownership on vinyl LPs.

Yet one set of data tells a story of different consumption patterns between music and e-books that could affect the way these services develop in the future.  Subscription music services have been displacing digital downloads of music from services like Apple iTunes, as unit volume from the latter category has shifted into steep decline.  But the same is not true for e-books, as the following graph shows:

Add to this the fact that physical book sales -- unlike sales of music CDs -- are fairly stable, and one can conclude that the reading public doesn't get subscription e-book services -- or at least doesn't get them yet.

How long will it take before we know for sure?  Even though all of the major record labels licensed content to Rhapsody back in 2002, it took until 2011 for subscription music services to reach beyond a niche audience.  One reason for this was lack of reliable high-speed mobile Internet access during the early 2000s, which made downloads the only reasonable way to get digital music that people could listen to on portable devices.  But another reason was the newness of the consumption model.  Subscription music went mainstream thanks to the massive media hype around Spotify's launch combined with the music industry's realization that an already hugely popular content platform -- YouTube -- served as a de facto on-demand music service.

Similarly, the book publishing industry is going to have to be prepared to spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars to educate readers about the benefits of subscription e-book services and to tweak the offerings until users like them.  It remains to be seen whether e-book startups like Oyster and Scribd, and their investors, can afford the time and money.