Fixing a Subscription Based World

The 20th century brought a new dilemma to the public eye – how to consume media. With the advent of the movies, television and radio, people could now watch or hear rather than read stories about starlets, cowboys, and the future. And three models of production were put in place – pay per physical product, “free” listening, and (eventually) a subscription cable model. We can now look at movies, books, and radio programming as comparable products because of how much they influence each other’s content today. They are all easily accessible online. Yet if these objects are related, why were there such drastically different means of obtaining them? And what does it mean now that they’re starting to be sold in the same way?

In the beginning it made sense. The printing press was designed to create distinct manuscripts for individuals through mass production. And this idea  has carried on for nearly 600 years – until today. With the advent of Amazon’s inclusion of a free monthly book rental as part of their yearly Prime subscription service, the development of Spotify, a subscription music service that allows you to create a music library within their program, and Netflix for movies it seems like other media industries are all taking a tip from cable and realizing the gains they can get from letting consumers passively pay for media.

Amazon Lending Library vs. Digital Public Library of America

The Internet is abuzz today over Amazon’s new Lending Library. This new service offers Amazon Prime/Kindle owners the chance to borrow one digital ebook a month for free. While this may seem like a pittance to anyone who has been a frequent user of a physical library, this is actually a nice way to get your hands on that one-book-you’ve-heard-of-but-just-don’t-want-to-buy. This service obviously won’t currently replace physical libraries or book stores, or even put a dent in the ebook market but it is starting a trend.

With the Amazon Lending Library, consumers are going to be plugged into subscription based reading. This is the new Netflix of books, as some are calling it. I’m not against the idea but I wonder if having Amazon as the promoter of this idea is in the public interest. To disuss the title of this post, this seems to me to be the Lending Library vs. the Digital Public Library of America. It’s book sales and marketing and profits versus coordination between academic, public, and government libraries. It’s a race to become the first online library.