Monday, October 25, 2010

Bookflix?

I have seen the future and it is this article in Inside Higher Ed, "An Amazon Book Rental Plan."  At least I hope it's the future.  Mind you, Amazon doesn't do this yet.  It just could be really nice.

The idea is something like Netflix. 
  • I pay a monthly fee to have access to electronic books on Amazon or Google.
  • I access those eBooks like I would access books in a library.  I check one or two out at a time.  Return them.  Check out the next one.
This could also potentially answer the question of royalties on the other end.  What if authors/publishers received a small royalty every time someone accessed their books?

So here's what would be my perfect world:
  • Google/Amazon have all books in electronic format.
  • You have a subscription, to where you pay a very small amount for every page you access.
  • An even smaller amount is paid to each publisher/author each time a page of their book is accessed.
  • Or you can purchase the book electronically because you will be accessing that book regularly.
How 'bout it, Google?  Amazon?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ken, When Luther stood before the Diet of Worms the first question he was asked was not "Do you recant?" Rather, it was "Did you write all of these?" Or, to paraphrase, "Is it actually possible that one person wrote all of these?" And, of course, that's about how I think of your prolific habits. Against this backdrop, royalties on every access make a lot of sense. it's always struck me as a disconnect with our taxation policies that our books are sold in used bookstores and we see no royalties, yet Uncle Sam gets another percentage via sales tax. One major problem (or frustration) w the Amazon arrangement is that they get a huge percentage of the book price. On the other end, most of us authors are more concerned or interested in the highest number of readership. J. Pattengale

Ken Schenck said...

And also with you ;-)

Marsha Lynn said...

This concept is already being implemented in the library world. See www.overdrive.com.