I mentioned it here and here: Streaming, Lending; Ebooks Subscription Based Services. Updating the thread now:
Germany based service: «Ebooks to borrow rather than buy».
- Basic: € 9,99 monthly – 3 books simultaneously borrowed – 2 devices synchronized – 24h offline reading
- Plus: € 14.99 monthly – 5 books simultaneously borrowed – 2 devices synchronized – 30 days offline reading
- Pemium: 19.99 monthly – 15 books simultaneously borrowed – 3 devices synchronized – 30 days offline reading
Dutch service. Subscriptions start at an introductory offer of 14.95 euros for three months, allowing up to five books at once available. The top offer is subscription of 169 euros per year, which allows up to fifteen books to be borrowed at once.
Lending service – You already know it… (must be Prime member – 79USD yearly – Books that are borrowed from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library can be read only on Kindle devices.)
Self-explaining.
Barcelona Based: «premium subscription at 8,99 Euro monthly».
«Select a subscription plan for 2 ($14.99), 3 ($22.50), or 4 ($29.99) books a month.»
They say you get the ownership of all downloaded e-books: “eReatah is not a rental or streaming service”.
Brasil based subscription service: 3 books weekly.
The Digital Reader is not convinced: «The service costs 3.90 Brazilian reais per week, or about $1.69 USD, and (according to one Brazilian ebook blog) offers access to 130 titles. No, that is not typo; it really is one hundred and thirty ebooks for 2 bucks a week.»
Denmark based renting service. Around 13 Euro (99 Danish krones) monthly. They claim 8.000 books on the catalogue.
15k titles (9 euro monthly): «Choose between reading a subset of this catalog online for free, or become a Premium reader with a small subscription fee, and access the whole catalog, offline, and with no ads».
Another Danish service: one month subscription (69 Danish Krones,around 9 euros): you can download (and I guess own) 1 single book each month.
«Pay per page, unlimited page skipping »
«As you read, the proportional value of the pages you read is deducted from your balance. These pages are yours, you can access them anytime. Whatever happens, you never pay more than the full book price. That is brilliant, you pay only for the pages you actually read».
Few comments:
«James McQuivey: All the evidence suggests that consumers love subscription content models — it’s the original model of magazines and newspapers and cable, and now it’s the power behind Netflix. I believe it would work with books, but like the ebook model in the early days, it won’t work until the publishers are ready to embrace it, which they won’t for a whole host of reasons».
«How many people have signed up? TA: We’re not disclosing that yet, but we do plan to make an announcement when we hit a milestone. But it looks good and it’s growing quickly. Since we soft launched in January, it’s been growing 60% month-over-month and in the last few weeks it’s more than doubled».
«The ebook subscription services face an interesting business challenge. For any new ebook purveyor to succeed, it must satisfy three primary stakeholders: 1. Customers (readers). 2. Suppliers of the product they sell (authors and publishers). 3. Itself (it must earn a profit so it can keep the lights on and reinvest in its business)».
