Another nail in the coffin of subscription book reading

Electric Literature reports:

Scribd Puts Another Nail in the Coffin of “Netflix for Books” – Electric Literature

A few years ago, everyone seemed certain that ebooks were taking over, and companies rushed to form the first successful “Netflix for books” service that could provide readers with unlimited ebooks for a low monthly price. Amazon jumped into the market with Kindle Unlimited, challenging the already existing Scribd and Oyster for the ebook subscription […]

We’ve written previously about Scribd and the challenges of the ebook subscription model. Electric Lit reports that Scribd will more-or-less gut the service by imposing hard-to-understand limits on how much you can read on the service. It’s challenging enough to make an economic rationale for Scribd, in it’s current form (as I wrote here). This will make it near-impossible.

Whither the eBooks subscription model?

The news that Oyster is closing shop (or at least, abandoning their eBooks subscription business) suggests a re-evaluation of the subscription eBook business model is in order. We’ve written before…

I think it’s the endgame, until the publishers see this model as a benefit and revenue source, rather than as something to be tolerated.

What do you think?

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