Amazon Is Testing a $10-Per-Month Ebook Service 87
Nate the greatest (2261802) writes "Details are still scarce but it looks like Amazon is going to be launching a competitor to Scribd and Oyster. Earlier today new pages leaked on the Amazon website which mentioned Kindle Unlimited, a new subscription ebook service. The pages were quickly removed, but not before we got some screenshots. If the screenshots are to be believed Kindle Unlimited is going to offer a catalog of over 600,000 titles for $9.99 a month. The news hasn't been confirmed by Amazon but those pages were seen by a number of authors and bloggers, including indie authors who confirmed that the new service is mentioned in their sales reports."
Re:No thank you. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm assuming that it will be the same books that are in the Kindle lending library. It's a feature of Amazon Prime where you can check out 1 book at a time (and only one new book per month). It's limited as it currently exists, but I assume when this feature hits, your Prime account will let you have one book out at a time with more than one swap per month.
Re:Make it $4.99 and epub, not mobi (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I am a mamber of a free (Score:4, Informative)
You joke, but my mother in law used to work at a local library. A very small local library with a very small budget.
At one point, they started getting into eBook lending. Because the publishers are greedy, the cost of an eBook to a library is huge -- in the hundreds if not thousands per title.
Basically what they used to do was go to book sales, used book stores and stuff like that, and buy a very large amount of titles for the library. It was inexpensive, and got them a lot of titles.
After the eBook thing, they had no budget for new paper books, and only about 100 eBook titles (or something equally ridiculous). Because they'd spent the entire budget on getting screwed over by publishers.
Unless you're a very well funded library, eBook lending is so prohibitively expensive that you almost have to give up your money to buy paper books for the library.
She couldn't retire fast enough, because she figured if they were spending the entire budget on a handful of eBooks, the library was pretty much screwed.
Me, I prefer to stick with my dead tree editions of books. I can sit by a pool reading Tom Clancy, battery life isn't an issue, water splashing isn't going to be a catastrophic failure, and some greedy bastard doesn't get to monetize my reading habits.
But I wouldn't think for a minute that eBooks and the like aren't actually damaging many libraries more than they benefit.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)