“Netflix for X” is one of those tropes of Silicon Valley that has rapidly overtaken “iTunes for Y” and “Spotify for Z” as the elevator pitch du jour for content providers. (“Uber for” pretty much anything seems like the next terrifying suggestion gathering pace.) Netflix for books has been one of those promises for a while, with a few companies testing the waters.
The book streaming service Oyster launched a year ago, and while it’s a US-only company (which means you can’t get it here unless you have a US iTunes or Android account), its approach is a good guide to the sector. For $9.95 a month, subscribers get unlimited access to half a million titles, and Oyster has managed to sign up “Big Five” publishers such as HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. This is the real challenge for book subscription services: getting enough titles people actually want on to their virtual shelves, without scaring off publishers who’ve only just got comfortable with downloads. Oyster’s multi-app approach also means you can read books on smartphones and on Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
Not surprisingly, the company with the best shot at “persuading” publishers on to their platform is Amazon itself, and in July it launched Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service that reached the UK in September. Priced at £7.99 a month, Kindle Unlimited includes some 700,000 titles – or around 25% of Amazon’s library – though none of its top 20 books are included yet. Access will undoubtedly grow over time, but the biggest issue of subscription services is ownership. Kindle Unlimited is actually limited to 10 titles at a time, which means that it’s less useful than it might first appear for obvious users such as students and researchers. Deleting your Kindle Unlimited account will also remove all the books you’ve been paying for – something of a lock-in for those who like to hold on to their library. But, as Spotify, Netflix and others have shown, that might simply no longer be an issue for most.
