From Digitopoly:
Amazon just made official its Kindle Unlimited service that, for $9.99 per month, offers subscribers unlimited access to, at the moment, 600,000 books (including some big titles like Harry Potter). Basically, this is the Netflix model applied to reading and, from my perspective, it is interesting because I predicted it two years ago in Information Wants to be Shared. Here is the relevant part:
Lending Is Right
The great libraries of history held a special place in the hearts of scholars because they represented a repository of all knowledge. In the digital age, the single repository makes little sense. Knowledge can be stored and duplicated. As a result, it is protected. What is more, knowledge is at your fingertips. Instead, in 1945, Vannevar Bush envisaged immediate and universal access.[i] His memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer, was to be a store of all knowledge (including personal knowledge) and curated with what we now call hyperlinks to enable searching and associations. The fact that people rarely envisage owned collections rather than shared access should tell us something about how things are supposed to be.
Lending is the natural state for books and publishers. So how would the business of publishing look if it were built around lending rather than ownership? To see this, let’s start with the notion that all books are read on devices. Now imagine that each device has a built-in means of tracking what people read and how much. Imagine that it can also do this in a manner that respects privacy. Then it is possible to construct a model that will allow authors or publishers to receive money based on how much of a book people read and to price that at will.How would this work? I imagine that there is a vast exchange available—maybe we could actually call it a library—where all books ever written are available. Publishers nominate reading prices for their books, and consumers read books. One model has the consumers pay the publishers the fees that the publishers quote. This is something akin to what Google would like to see with respect to Google Books. But that isn’t the only model. Alternatively, an exchange might sell access to the library at a subscription fee that doesn’t require consumers to feel the marginal cost of reading another chapter or trying a book. The subscription fees would then comprise revenue, and the authors or publishers would then get paid from that according to their nominated fees and information gathered from consumers on actual reading.
This would change the industry in two ways. First, if most people subscribed to this model, then it will also be easy for reading to become a shared good. When you referred others to a book or extracts from a book, there would be no cost to you or them, maximizing the incentives for such sharing and improving the value of reading.Second, part of the reason information wants to be shared is because the costs of creating that information can be spread over more users. While in the past, authors were rewarded on the basis of sales—which partly included nonreading motivations, such as ornamental value—in this alternative model, the contribution to the costs of creation would come solely for reading. This would change significantly the incentives of authors; they would want to create works that were read and, moreover, read the whole way through.[ii] This type of reward structure is simply not possible to imagine in an ownership model. That said, one can see a potential issue regarding giving books as gifts. When there is shared access, this does not seem easily viable; unless, of course, it is a rare, physical copy to be displayed prominently in one’s house.Digital technologies have altered the balance on ownership relative to lending as the principal means by which books, and content similar to books, are consumed. Breaking free of physical norms allows us to think about alternative models that both increase consumer value and also allow the distribution of that value to fund more creative activity....MORE
