The Unlimited Model

Joe Wikert makes a good point about the rise of the “all you can eat” subscription model and how this might play out in the book world:

As this BusinessWeek article notes, the pay-per-song model might be living on borrowed time. All you can eat subscription models like Rhapsody are gaining popularity. It makes sense to me. After all, I don’t care how much music I “own”; I just care how much I have access to. Would I pay $12.99/month for the right to fill up a 30-, 40- or 80-gig MP3 player with all the music I could possibly want? You bet, especially since I’ll know the door is always open to download even more as my interests and tastes change.

Now stop and think about how this applies to the book publishing world. Could you imagine a model where you pay $X/month for access to an unlimited number of books? It’s never going to happen in the print world but I think this could be the killer app for the Kindle, a world where manufacturing and distribution costs are zero. Access to every single book in the entire Kindle library could be yours for a monthly fee. Assuming the monthly fee is reasonable this could be the model that really kick-starts the e-book industry.

Although I don’t think the Kindle presages the end-times, I’m personally not a big fan of e-books and would be a bit happier if I didn’t have to worry about acquiring electronic rights and whatnot. That said, I’ve been a big proponent of the “unlimited” model for a while. I subscribe to Rhapsody, to Netflix, and the idea of having unlimited access to as many books as you want, immediately and anywhere is sort of appealing.

In other words, I’m not shelling out $400 bucks to buy “Kindle versions” of books (which apparently lack most footnotes), but under this model, I could see this catching on with a substantial nuimber of readers. For a while, I’ve been of the mindset that e-books would catch on when the product/model available solved distribution problems. Allowing readers to “test the water” of as many books as they want, downloaded instantaneously to their little device, accomplishes just this . . . And in contrast to the Paperspine idea, delivery would be instantaneous, and Amazon wouldn’t face the same inventory problems inevitable in the Paperspine model.