As more and more readers make the transition from the age-old paper books to e-books, tech companies are scrambling to cater to their needs. You have Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple iBooks, Scribd, Oyster, and more, some of which allows readers to read an unlimited amount of the latest bestsellers for a monthly fee, usually $10. Some ditch this subscription model for a flat fee per book.
Spotify, which has already seen great success with the model in music, is now getting ready to enter the subscription business with its new “Spotify for Books” launch. But The Economist points out that the company might not be able to replicate the success it had with music as with books.
The fact is that the book market isn’t currently as hard hit by piracy, so the biggest publishers have no incentive to make their most popular books available on these services. Which is both a good and bad thing. record companies tolerate music-streaming services like Spotify, which pay them only modest fees, because the alternative is a continued rise in music piracy—on which they earn nothing at all. However, piracy of e-books is not such a problem: it is perfectly feasible for publishers to keep back some titles from subscription services and make money by selling individual copies of them.
So unless the e-book market changes in unexpected ways, subscription services may have only a limited impact on consumer-book publishing, according to The Economist.
Either way, we will know in a short time.