Subscription services

Posted by on 13 September 2011 1:16 Leave a comment (2) Go to comments

Amazon is reported to be “in talks” to create a subscription service for ebooks. While Amazon’s “selling” (read: licensing) of ebooks through their Kindle ecosystem currently blurs the distinction between owning something and merely being allowed to use it, subscription services blur that even more. Spotify and Netflix have done that for movies and music–I don’t own the songs I’ve starred in Spotify, even though I seem to be able to listen to them whenever I want. For the convenience of having access to a vast library of media, I have relinquished my claim to control over that media; my ability to stream is at the mercy of Spotify. Amazon would like to do a similar thing with books. It will be a difficult proposition for both publishers and consumers.

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  • Cale Larsen

    Hmm, that is a very interesting thought on ownership. Society does appear to be making a shift from owning something to simply having access to it. I don’t think I’m in a position to say whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it will be intriguing to see how this shift effects commerce as well as media in general. If you look at music for example, album records dropped tremendously in sales since the internet started providing quick and easy downloads. I wonder if we’ll see a similar drop in other areas of media and entertainment.

  • http://globalconstant.scnay.com/ Steve Nay

    Another example of this that we take for granted is the search engine. It’s becoming more and more rare for people to own an encyclopedia. You simply don’t need it because of search engines and Wikipedia. So while owning those books used to be a bit of an intellectual symbol, it’s becoming less and less relevant.

    We’ve outsourced the responsibility of having written knowledge in-house and no one even thinks twice about it anymore.