Various models of a Netflix style book collection on Amazon

Some news reports have been announcing that Amazon is considering creating a Netflix style program for ebooks.

See:
Amazon eyes Netflix for e-books: A move to get more Prime subscribers

or

Amazon as a 'Netflix for Books'? How Reading Changes

I wanted to look at some of the options that Amazon could take in regards to creating a Netflix style book collection.

Model 1: Amazon would have a collection of several thousand books. People would pay a separate monthly fee to access this collection. If you pay the fee you have full access to the books in the collection. You could open and read any book in the collection while you are a member.

Model 2: Amazon would have a collection of several thousand books. People would pay a separate monthly fee to access this collection. You could access a selected number of books per month. Number you could access would likely be 2-3 books per month.

Model 3: Same as Model 2 but the 2-3 books you “access” would be yours to read in perpetuity on your Kindle. In Model 2 when you cancel your plan you would no longer have access to the books. In Model 3 the books you select you could continue to read after the plan ends.

Model 4: Amazon users that paid a monthly fee could access any two Kindle books per month including new releases. Example: You pay Amazon $10 per month. A new Kindle ebook is released and it cost $14.99. As a member of the plan you could read this book for no additional cost beyond your monthly subscription fee. Every month you could select any two books to read as part of the plan. Model 4 is different from Model 3 in that you would not be limited from selecting Kindle books from a specific pool but could select any Kindle book. I would assume that there would be some kind of limits. For example textbooks would likely be excluded from this plan.

Comments:
From some of the news stories I have read it sounds like Amazon is leaning towards Model 2. I am assuming that they are leaning towards this model because it would be less threatening to publishers.

I think that publishers would be fairly safe with Model 1 because you can physically look at only so many books per month. If you did not have access to the collection when you were not a member there would not be a fear about someone getting a 1 month subscription, downloading a thousand books, and then cancelling their subscription. On Netflix if you cancel your subscription you no longer have access to the collection. Models 1 and 2 reflect this Netflix style. (I would argue that Model 1 is closest to what Netflix currently has) Model 3 and 4 would allow having access to the books even after you were not a member. Neither Model 3 nor 4 allow you to download a huge number of books so there is not too much possibility for abuse.

Questions:

What model would you like to see Amazon adopt?

Have you thought of a model that is not listed?

What impact do you think this will have on publishing, book prices, and libraries?

The Pale King

To publicize the release of “The Pale King,” a posthumously published novel by David Foster Wallace that is set in an Internal Revenue Service processing center, Hachette Book Group created a marketing campaign centered on the traditional tax day: April 15.

Except that’s not really when it went on sale.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble were selling the book on their Web sites on Wednesday, long before many bookstores would receive copies. Nicole Dewey, a spokeswoman for Little, Brown, part of Hachette, said the official on-sale date for the book was March 22, but the publication date — when the book is available everywhere — remained April 15. (A countdown clock on the Hachette Web site ticks away the days, hours and minutes until April 15.)

“I don’t really understand the confusion,” Ms. Dewey said. “This happens all the time. There’s nothing unusual about it.”

Full article in the NYT

Judge Sets Trial Date in Georgia State University E-Reserves Lawsuit

Buried beneath the news of the Google Settlement’s rejection last week, a federal judge in Georgia has paved the way for publishers to go to trial in a contentious copyright case involving e-reserve practices at Georgia State University. On March 17, Judge Orinda Evans denied a GSU motion to dismiss the final count in the suit, setting May 16th as a trial date. The order comes after Evans denied all three of the publishers’ motions for summary judgment, while granting two of three GSU motions to dismiss, in October, 2010. She allowed the action to proceed on a single, more narrowly drawn charge of contributory infringement.

Full article at Publisher's Weekly

Kindlefish Turns Kindle Into Worldwide Translator

The 3G Kindle is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Sure, you can read books on it, but with its web browser, you can also access Wikipedia from anywhere in the world. Until now, though, there was one thing it didn’t do so well — translation. That has been fixed by Kindlefish, made by Gadget Lab reader Nicholas.

Nicholas found that Google Translate is badly suited to the e-reader’s admittedly limited web browser. “Standard Google Translate doesn’t work for the Kindle,” he writes on his blog, “and the mobile Google Translate page returns text that is too small to be easily read, and a little clunky for use on the Kindle.”

To get around this, he wrote a new front-end called Kindlefish, a homage to the universally translating Babelfish from Douglas Adams’ five-part Hitchhiker’s trilogy. The interface is simple, letting you set three preferred languages for quick access, and one input language (English by default). You just type your phrase on the Kindle’s little keyboard and hit the “Translate” button.

Full article at Wired.com

Conn. Prisons Agency To Review Library Books

The state Department of Correction will review its library collections after learning that Steven Hayes, convicted in the 2007 Cheshire home invasion, read books in prison depicting violent murders and the burning of victims.
The new rules for Connecticut's prison libraries will be in place around July 1.

Full article.

What is the value of book?

How much do you think a good story is worth?  I don't mean a book necessarily since books can be collectible and that's not what I am getting at here, but how much do you think a novel length story is worth?

When deciding this you might compare the value of the read vs. other entertainments such as the cost of a movie rental? The price of a video game? The cost of a newspaper or magazine? The drop in fee for a local gym or that knitting class at the community center?  For me the value varies wildly depending on how much I enjoy (or expect to enjoy) the book.

With that in mind I have been thinking about the current "race to the bottom" debate in e-publishing that has been raging on the blogosphere. For those of you who are unaware it essentially boils down (in an inelegant way) to publishers claiming that self published authors are going to ruin publishing by offering eBooks at rock bottom prices; while the self-published authors are claiming that large publishing houses are bloated profiteers.

Full blog post at Bookfinder

The Three Largest Bookselling Chains Mapped

Publisher's Weekly has a map of the store locations of the three largest booksellers.

Open Letter to Cory Doctorow

Open Letter to Cory Doctorow

In your post about the HarperCollins situation you wrote this:

And that's why libraries should just stop buying DRM media for their collections. Period. It's unsafe at any speed.

I mean it. When HarperCollins backs down and says, "Oh, no, sorry, we didn't mean it, you can have unlimited ebook checkouts," the libraries' answers should be "Not good enough. We want DRM-free or nothing." Stop buying DRM ebooks. Do you think that if you buy twice, or three times, or ten times as many crippled books that you'll get more negotiating leverage with which to overcome abusive crap like this? Do you think that if more of your patrons come to rely on you for ebooks for their devices, that DRM vendors won't notice that your relevance is tied to their product and tighten the screws?

There is a point I think you are missing. Many librarians do not just want DRM free books. They want to OWN the book you sell them. When they OWN the book they can sell the copy they bought or give it to someone else. For one of your books why not go beyond the Creative Commons license and create an ebook version that when sold is the equivalent of a print book? If someone buys one copy of the ebook they should have the right to sell one copy of the ebook. If they sell their copy they should not have a copy after the sale. This would require them to delete the copy they have, once they have made a sale and transferred a copy to another individual. This new purchaser would then OWN the copy of the book and could also sell their copy.

I think it would be an interesting experiment to see what it actually means to have first sale rights in an ebook.

Libraries demand their rights. What are their responsibilities?

This post is in response to the controversy regarding HarperCollins putting a cap of 26 loans on ebooks that they offer to libraries through vendors like Overdrive.

In the article UNLOCKING THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC LIBRARIES: DIGITAL LICENSING THAT PRESERVES ACCESS (16 U. Balt. Intell. Prop. L.J. 29) there is discussion about libraries not being pirates and as such should not be treated as pirates.

...our public libraries are not Grokster or Napster and should not be
considered so by publishers. The public library is not in the business of
providing the pipes for unfettered access to copyrighted works.

The article goes on to say:

Like publishers, the public library is in the business of disseminating information, encouraging consumption of that information, and promoting respect for authors, artists and scientists.


I think most librarians would agree with the two statements from the article. 

Some librarians are now calling for an eBook User’s Bill of Rights. What I do not see in any of the "bill of rights" are any discussion of the responsibilities of libraries. What are libraries going to do to protect and support authors in the new digital environment?

Why did HarperCollins put a limit of 26 uses on an ebook? There are doing this because consumers are out forum shopping for libraries that have digital content that they can use. Instead of buying ebooks people are joining libraries in other states so that they can use their ebooks. Take a look at these two comments that were posted on ebook discussions by people telling how they are getting content for their Nook and Sony readers.

The Free Libary of Philadelphia ($15 a year for non-residents) just recently added all of the magic tree house books. I live in the Washington DC area and get most of my books from the DC library and the FLP (both have great selections). I've been noticing both of them adding more and more children's book lately.

I live in Florida and just sent a check for $15 for my library card for the Free Library of Philadelphia. I understand I can borrow ebooks from them. My local library doesn't offer ebooks yet. Has anyone used this library. How does it work? I understand it uses overdrive. Any suggestions? How long will I be able to have a book? Thanks all.

So in these two examples we have people in DC and in Florida using ebooks from the Free Library of Philadelphia (FLP). If you live in the city the library is free but if you live in another state you can join for $15. Numerous people have joined the FLP to get cheaper access to ebooks. Logic is very simple. If a single ebook cost $10-$15 one ebook borrowed from FPL made up for the $15 spent to join the library.

FPL has a blog post about the 26 book cap: HarperCollins makes changes to library e-book sales and lending

What the publishers see is a world where everyone joins one library and uses the ebooks from that single collection. The publisher view of the world may not be completely clear but it would be useful to stand in their shoes and look at their perspective before librarians denigrate publishers as evil for instituting the 26 loan cap. In addition to demanding "rights" libraries need to also be looking out for the rights of publishers and authors.

E-Book Boom Changes Book Selling And Publishing

The popularity of e-books and e-readers has soared since the release of the Amazon Kindle three years ago. Now the digital devices continue to drive readers to electronic books. It's changing how books are read, sold and published.

Listen to the full piece on NPR: Talk of the Nation

How will you win at ebook retailing?

Blog entry by Mike Shatzkin

I read all my books on my iPhone and my idiosyncracy is to have different books open in various ebook readers at the same time. This is a drastic change from my lifetime habit of reading one book at a time. I never knew I’d enjoy reading this way because the physical limitations of carrying paper around never encouraged me to consider it.

At the moment, I’m reading “Joe Cronin” by Mark Armour and “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey A. Moore on Google Books; “Washington” by Ron Chernow on the Nook reader (which I see now has lost my place and is forcing me to figure out where the hell I was, which is not a good thing); “Brooklyn Dodgers: The Last Great Pennant Drive” by John Nordell in Kobo; and “The Autobiography of Mark Twain” in Kindle. I have the iBooks reader on the phone but I never shop there because I never saw any particular advantage to the reader and they have distinctly fewer titles to choose from than everybody else.

Full post

Kids' Books Make The Leap Off The Page And Online

 In an effort to keep up with a generation of young, tech-savvy readers, children's book publishers are creating plots that straddle multiple platforms. In Scholastic's popular series 39 Clues, only pieces of the puzzle can be solved by reading the books — to solve the mystery in full, readers must take their quest online.

Full piece at NPR

Glad Tidings for E-Books

As recently as late 2007, the purchase of this book would have involved a trip to a bookstore, the distinct possibility that, given its rarified subject, it would be out of stock or, if ordered from Amazon, would not arrive for a week unless I was willing to pay the high cost of expedited shipping. The odds are that those prospective obstacles would have led me to do something else, and I would never have gotten around to reading Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter. That would have been too bad, but hardly a big deal. By now, the notion has embedded in my mind that I can choose on a whim to read a book and obtain it instantly, a fundamental change in the psychology of book buying. You don't really possess the book in the sense that it lands on your shelf as a lifetime fixture, but the notion that the book is available and affordable is a significant incentive to make the purchase.

Full article in The Atlantic

How much an ebook holds may not be the right question

I posted a timeline that Microsoft created in 2000 that made predictions about the growth of ebooks over the next 20 years. The prediction for 2010 was: Popular eBook devices weigh eight ounces, run for more than 24 hours, offer beautiful non-backlit displays, are available in flexible/foldable form factors, and hold more books and magazines than most university libraries. They cost less than $100 and are often given away free with the purchase of several books or a magazine subscription.

At Teleread.org they posted a link to my blog post about the Microsoft timeline. In the comments section on Teleread there was this comment: They’re in the ballpark if you use weight and battery life as yardstick. Storage capacity is a horse of a different stripe – boy, were they ever *way* off on that one !

The prediction by Microsoft was that by 2010 ebooks would hold more books and magazines than most university libraries.

There can be some debate about the amount of books in "most university libraries" but from the initial numbers that I have seen university libraries have from 500,000 to a million books. Larger university collections have 2-3 million books. Because we are looking at "most" university libraries we will use the 500,000 number for this discussion. If you go to Amazon they show 557,158 nonfiction ebooks and 241,067 fiction ebooks. The sum of fiction and nonfiction is 798,225 ebooks. One of the first nonfiction books that is displayed on Amazon was a word game for the Kindle. The 798,225 number is going to be high because of Amazon games for the Kindle and duplicate titles and other issues that winnow down the actual count. Trying to be conservative let us assume that the count is off by 200,000. That leaves us with 598,225 ebooks that are available for download to a Kindle. If you have a 3G Kindle you effectively have access within minutes to any of these 598,000 ebooks. In that regard the Microsoft prediction was correct.
 
I wanted to discuss the comment about what ebooks could hold to get to a larger issue. I think the larger issue is whether people can afford to get to those 598,000 books. Who cares how much your ebook can store if you cannot afford to buy enough ebooks to fill it? The current Kindle will hold around 1500 ebooks in internal memory.  To fill that memory you are going to have to spend around $15,000. 
 
One of the dangers of ebooks is that people fall for the myth that they are carrying a library when they are carrying an ebook reader. The danger of this is that when people feel they have their own library they no longer feel it is necessary to support their local library. When city and state budgets get tight they say "I have a library in my Kindle. I don't want to pay anymore taxes so lets get rid of the library." The problem is whether the person really has access to as much as they did when they had a physical library to go to? 
 
I don't bring up this point to demonize ebooks. I bring this up to remind people to honestly assess how much information they actually have access to with an ebook reader. They have as much access as they can afford to purchase. (Granted I am excluding books in the public domain. But many times you need to purchase those also. See: Why Get It Free on Gutenberg When You Can Buy It on Kindle?)
 
The technology is in place to allow us to have a national digital library. We really need a robust national digital library. If not national maybe we need robust state digital libraries. Underlying idea is that if people want to read and learn the limits should be on how much time they have to read and how much they want to learn not by how much money is in their pocket. I realize this is somewhat pollyannish utopian socialist talk but there are times when we have to reach for big ideas.
 
Here are two recent articles about that topic. One of them is by David Rothman who founded Teleread.
 
Why We Can't Afford Not to Create a Well-Stocked National Digital Library System
 
Can We Create a National Digital Library?
 

This ebook sponsored by...

There was a recent piece in the WSJ about advertisements in ebooks.

There are mentions of ads on the margins of ebooks and ads at the beginning, middle, and end. Clearly some of these ideas could be disruptive to an immersive reading experience.

There is an idea for advertisements in ebooks that I wish would take off because I would like cheaper ebooks. That idea is sponsorship for ebooks. Take a company that would like to advertise. The Acme Widget Company for example. You go on Amazon to buy an ebook and you see two choices for the ebook. One version is the standard Kindle version and it cost $9.99. There is also an Acme Widget Company version for $5.99. You purchase the Acme version of the book. On your ereader the cover page of the ebook says that it is the Acme Widget version of the book and after the cover there are a few pages explaining some Acme Widget products.

If readers would get a direct price reduction when purchasing an ebook with advertising I don't think many people would object. And if someone does object they can always buy the $9.99 version that has no advertising. The strongest thing about this idea is the goodwill that a company would earn by saving someone money on a book they wanted. I think that some companies would go with the tact of only mentioning their sponsorship on the cover. The act of saving book buyers several dollars at the time of purchase would give many people a positive outlook on the company that just provided the discount for the book they wanted.

Feel Free to Read This Later, on Your Phone

Apps like Instapaper and Flipboard encourage people browsing the Web to save long articles to read later.

Full article in the NYT

Kraft is not spreading joy

Spread a Little Joy is a cookbook by Kraft that is available as a Kindle ebook for $9.99. The cookbook is designed to promote Philadelphia cream cheese. I don't think there will be that many people that will pay to get a marketing piece from Kraft. Actually I can see one reason why Kraft would think this is a good idea. If someone pays $9.99 for the cookbook that they are very likely to go buy some Philly because they just spent good money on the cookbook and as such would likely use some of the recipes. I would think a price like $2.99 might be better because more people would buy the book if the price is cheaper.

Article about the ebook. Excerpt from article: Kraft is launching an eBook to back its Philadelphia cream cheese, another initiative that would have consumers paying for digital marketing material.

Microsoft predictions for ebooks in 2010

In 2000 Microsoft put out a timeline predicting what would happen the next 20 years with ebooks.

The prediction for 2010 was: Popular eBook devices weigh eight ounces, run for more than 24 hours, offer beautiful non-backlit displays, are available in flexible/foldable form factors, and hold more books and magazines than most university libraries. They cost less than $100 and are often given away free with the purchase of several books or a magazine subscription.

The Kindle weighs 8.5 ounces and cost $139 for the cheapest model. Microsoft was in the ballpark of being correct.

Here is the full list of predictions:

E-PUBLISHING TIMELINE

2000- Microsoft's Reader software for PCs and laptops ships. Customers buy more than one million eBook titles the first year it is available. 

2002- PCs and eBook devices offer screens that are as sharp as paper, with 200 dpi physical resolution, and an effective resolution of about 500 dpi with ClearType. 

2003- eBook devices weigh less than a pound and run for eight hours on a charge. Costs run from $99 for a simple black and white device to about $899 for the most powerful, color magazine-sized machine. 

2004- The Tablet PC becomes a mainstream option for computing. It is a pad-sized device that supports writing as well as eBook reading, and runs powerful computer applications in a slate form factor. More than half of all eReading is done on PCs and laptops, but dedicated eBooks, handheld machines and now Tablets account for the other half. 

2005- eBook title and ePeriodical sales top $1 billion. Many serial publications are given away free with advertising support that now also totals more than $1 billion. An estimated 250 million people regularly read books and newspapers on their PCs, laptops, and palm machines. 

2006- eNewstands (kiosks) proliferate on street corners, airports, etc. As usual, airlines offer customers old magazines on the flight, but the magazines are now downloaded to eBook devices. 

2008- eBook titles begin to outsell conventional volumes in most countries. The price of a new bestseller title is about $8-$10, but unit sales are much larger than average paper sales for similar titles a decade ago. 

2009- Several top authors now publish directly to their audiences, many of whom subscribe to their favorite authors rather than buy book-by-book. Some authors join genre cooperatives, in which they hold an ownership stake, to cover the costs of marketing, handle group advertising sales and sell "ancillary" (that is, non-electronic) rights, including "paper rights." Major publishing houses survive and prosper by offering authors editing and marketing services, rather than arranging for book printing. Printing firms diversify into eBook preparation and converting old paper titles to electronic formats. 

2010- Popular eBook devices weigh eight ounces, run for more than 24 hours, offer beautiful non-backlit displays, are available in flexible/foldable form factors, and hold more books and magazines than most university libraries. They cost less than $100 and are often given away free with the purchase of several books or a magazine subscription. 

2011- Advances in non-volatile chip storage, including Hitachi's Single Electron terabit chip, allow eBooks to store 4 million books - more than many university libraries - or every newspaper ever printed in America. 

2012- The pulp industry mounts its pro-paper "Real Books" ad campaign, featuring a friendly logger who urges consumers to "Buy the real thing - real books printed on real paper." 

2018- In common parlance, eBook titles are simply called "books." The old kinds are increasingly called "paper books." 

2020- Ninety percent of all titles are now sold in electronic rather than paper form. Webster alters its First Definition of "book" to mean, "a substantial piece of writing commonly displayed on a computer or other personal viewing device.".

AMAZON REVIEWS HIJACKED BY PAID HACKS?

Blog post at ereads.com

We keep asking Do Amazon Reviews Count? and the evidence is mounting that they not only count, but authors and publishers will resort to all kinds of subterfuges to win those quotable five-star reviews – or confer horrendous one-star ones on their competitors.

As to the latter… 

Public Libraries: Back to the Future

Blog post at Brave New World

So we return to today, where we see public spending being increasingly squeezed and public libraries often under funded and under resourced. They are clearly struggling to get to grips with the digital challenges they now face in their, infrastructure, content, lending model, community presence and funding. We may not approve of the Google scanning programme in its commercial objectives, but support it in its social ones. With the return of philanthropy and social conscience, perhaps we should rethink the role and funding of public libraries within a more open public / private mix. Why should we regard borrowing as free? We can all learn from history and although we all often only see but a fraction of the actual facts, there are clear opportunities offered which may help create new; reading rooms, book exchanges and virtual libraries, all free from the public purse, or which at least ease the current burden upon it.

Read full blog post