But, in reality, it’s closer to an electronic library that gives bookworms access to over a million Kindle books. More titles, easier access and quite possibly a saving of public funds.As a subscription service, it feels accurate to describe Kindle Unlimited as Amazon’s “Netflix for books”. 600,000 titles is, at a guess, some 550,000 greater than the library system of my native Bath and North East Somerset purchases with its share of my council tax (that is a guess by the way). So perhaps the habit of having those physical libraries with physical books also no longer needs to exist?Īnd finally, the stock of books available is far larger than any physical library (other than copyright depositaries like the British Museum) has available to readers. Now that the technology has changed that technological reason for State provision no longer exists. It was the specific attributes of books as physical objects in limited supply in any one location that led to councils (ie, the State) taking over library provision. For a fee one had unlimited access to the stock of that profit making private sector enterprise. Both WH Smith's and Boot's used to run lending libraries. The first being that paid subscriptions is exactly how lending libraries started out. So whatever Amazon's payment to authors is they would know that whatever flat free they charged a government would, for many subscribers, have a cost to the company of nothing.Īnd there's two more points. Purchase and reading habits aren't exactly the same but they will tend to map over each other. The statistic I recall is that only 8% of people buy more than one book a year: those that do buy more than one tending to purchase many more than one. ![]() For it's well known that only a small fraction of the population actually reads books at all. We can also be sure that Amazon would accept a very low price for a deal that covered the population. ![]() This is no different in principle from what Amazon is doing. Authors get a (small, agreed) payment every time one of their books is lent out. So we already operate our libraries on this basis. We have something called Public Lending Right and you can see the figures that are paid out here. And we in the UK already operate our libraries in that fashion. The first is that Amazon's actual cost of providing such a service is one fixed overhead (the original negotiations to launch the service, having the necessary infrastructure etc) and then a very small marginal payment to each author for each lend of a book. There's several things leading me to this thought, over and above just trying to make a mischievous suggestion. That's a lot less than Amazon is currently demanding but I would bet a very large sum of money that an adequate bulk discount could be arranged for such a slug of customers. There's some 60 million citizens meaning that we can, from that sum, afford to pay perhaps £20 (as with most numbers I use, there's a lot of rounding here, the numbers are not meant to be accurate, just informative as to magnitude and so on) for each subscription. As a country we spend some £1 billion a year (currently around $1.7 billion) on supporting the library system. ![]() I'll use the numbers from my native UK here simply because I have a better grasp of them. Let's just close down the lending libraries and buy every citizen an Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription. Which is true but also what sparks this little, not entirely and wholly serious, thought on public policy. HuffPo rather sneeringly argued that Amazon wants you to pay $120 a year for a library ticket. My colleague Michael Humphrey points us to David Byrne's worries about such all you can eat artistic delivery systems. Various people have various ideas about all of this. It costs, sadly for the US only at present, $9.99 a month and gives unlimited access to some 600,000 titles. Amazon has launched the mooted read all you can manage service and called it Kindle Unlimited.
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