Sounds good at $10 a month. Obviously, the selection offered will be important.
I have one of these already, down the road: the Caledonia branch of the Kent District Library. Don’t even have to pay $9.99!
Selection is far too limited. Spotify, etc, are worth paying for since they have relationships with all the major content owners.
Not to say it won’t improve, of course it will. But I won’t be paying at the start.
They have both physical and virtual offices, too!
I love the library, but the way the licensing for ebooks and the wait times for physical books work, I’d like a better option.
Not saying the selection here is going to suck anyway, but if anyone can get the ball rolling, it should be Amazon.
Well, some competition for Oyster then.
Amazon should have the benefit of being Amazon, though, even with their current quarrels with certain publishers.
I know my father currently pays like $25 a month for that Audible subscription that gets him 2 audio books a month. He doesn’t actually care about owning them, so if the selection is good this would be a much better option.
I will check the selection. If it’s good, I’m very ‘in.’ :)
At first glance the 8000 audio books seem like the best deal about this.
There’s also Scribd if you want a subscription service for ebooks. Check them out as well.
How can you tell what the selection is? As far as I can tell, they haven’t launched it.
Yeah, the billboard went up on the main site accidentally. No word on when it will launch officially.
There was a page left up showing all the ~600k books qualifying for a couple hours this afternoon.
I can probably buy 3-4 books for $10, as long as they aren’t the new book by some super author (which potentially will not be available from this anyway i’d guess).
Most people probably don’t read this many books a month. I have a pretty long commute which i read during and i read a bit most days at home as well, so i probably do (depending on book length).
I’ve come back to read some of my favorite books multiple times over the years. I’d obviously lose this if i was using a netflix like service and i happened to stop it.
Also, would this work with me using calibre? The kindle management ui still is not good and they can pry calibre from my cold, dead hands. This would be a deal breaker for me and i can’t see how they could limit my access if i was able to download the book to my computer.
For me to consider this, it would likely need to be a couple dollars cheaper and also have total selection.
We spent $932 on books in the last 12 months. That’s a tad more than $10 a month.
Well, i guess if you can buy one account and use it for something like 5 people, it will probably be worth it.
That’s for two people. Clearly it would work even if it were just me. Though I do like owning my electrons.
That is a crazy amount of reading and i thought i read a lot.
I read a lot more than 3-4 books a month (try a week, sometimes more than that), so if they reliably got the stuff I wanted to read, this would be a great deal. But I can’t see that happening given that it is completely and arbitrarily up to the copyright holders how, when and whether -anyone- has access to the digital versions of media whose rights they own. Netflix sure doesn’t manage it. And I can’t see big publishers that have been fighting tooth and nail to charge $15-20 for single new releases allowing Amazon to rent those new releases to people in bulk for $10 a month.
As long as Amazon keeps pulling BS like they are with publisher Hachette I’m not anxious to jump into this, and will send whathisname (Mr. Amazon) an email telling him so. For those unfamiliar with the battle:
“In the United States, Amazon has been discouraging customers from buying titles from Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher by market share. Late Thursday, it escalated the dispute by making it impossible to order Hachette titles being issued this summer and fall. It is using some of the same tactics against the Bonnier Media Group in Germany.”
Hachette is the publisher for J.K. Rowling, Michael Connelly, and a lot of other top authors. But also a friend of mine, Jennifer Brown, who writes popular YA (but is certainly not at the super top level so is really hurt by this.) You would go to buy a book from any of the authors under Hachette, and they would tell you your book will take 2 or 3 weeks to be delivered, and there would be major recommendations for other authors for whom you could get the book in normal time.
I hope this doesn’t replace or disrupt the Prime lending one-a-month freebies. I don’t read much, but I like that feature of Prime (and now that I’ve started, I’d like to finish reading all the James Bond books).