E-books are getting the Spotify subscription model.
Books have long been the last holdout as music, movies, games and even TV shows and magazines have embraced the subscription model. Pay a single monthly fee and you can gorge on all the content you can cram into your eyes and ears. But on Tuesday, Tim Waterstone, the founder of the UK bookstore Waterstones, announced Read Petite, a subscription streaming service for short fiction. It's a baby step toward a new model that could shake up an industry that has seen traditional books losing ground to e-books, which comprised 22.5 percent of the book market in 2012.
That market share will only continue to grow. Kobo says it tripled sales of its e-reader during the 2012 holiday season compared to the previous season and Amazon, well, Amazon won't tell us how many Kindles it has sold. Rest assured, though, it is a lot, and its Kindle lineup remains the most popular readers on the market. As the sale of e-readers and e-books continues to rise, demand for all-you-can-eat streaming services will grow. The publisher and bookseller who gets to market first will have the advantage of tying bibliophiles to its ecosystem.
Access to e-books as part of a subscription is nothing new. It started, of course, with the public library you might remember from childhood. In a more modern equivalent, Amazon Prime members with Kindles have access to the online retailer's Lending Library containing over 300,000 titles with no due dates. The downside is both have a finite number of copies that can be checked out. Public libraries have a limited number of licenses for each title, and the Kindle Lending Library limits you to one book at a time.
Waterson's Read Petite would give readers unlimited access to available book for a few bucks a month. The service will launch this fall, and it will be interesting to see how it is received by readers and, more importantly, publishers.
One publisher that's already on board is F+W Media. It offers subscriptions for its library of design, writing reference and romance genres -- genres that lend themselves to the all-you-can eat subscription model, said Chad Phelps, chief digital officer. The while working on a design or writing, readers can't be confined to a single text. They require multiple books as reference to their work. As for the romance market, they can't get enough.
"Romance readers are voracious readers," he said. "They'll read a novel a day sometimes. It's just one after another."
To that end, F+W has created a service that works for its readers because it sells directly to its readers. If they want to know what their readers want, they just ask.
While specific genres lend themselves to a subscription service, there is a market for the two-three book a week reader. It's just a question of who will act first and how.
As a company with a more traditional relationship with readers and publishers, Kobo toyed with several sales models before its launch in 2009. It settled on the a la carte platform, but not before trying out selling books by the chapter, a web-only streaming experience, and books that were ad-supported. But as a stand alone business, a subscription-based model doesn't make sense, Kobo CEO Mike Serbinis said. Still, Kobo learned a lot during those early trials and believes that subscriptions could be a part of a company's overall offerings that includes an a la carte offering.
"I absolutely see it as a part of our future. I think it makes a lot of sense," Serbinis told Wired.
It's nothing for someone to burn through half a season of a TV show on Netflix or listen to the entire Prince catalog on a Spotify. But the average person might not be inclined to read two novels in a month. But for those readers who would rather read a book than watch an episode of Gossip Girl, a subscription service would be eye-straining bliss. It's not a question of if it happens, but when.
