Back in September while everyone was waiting for Amazon to announce the Kindle Fire, Sebastian Anthony over at ExtremeTech speculated that Amazon would also roll out a digital library that would let Kindle/Amazon Prime users check out books for free. He went on to discuss what this would mean for public libraries and concluded that it could easily mean their death.
The announcement for the Fire came and went and there was nothing about the digital library so I forgot about the post. Just recently, however, Amazon announced the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library that does pretty much what Anthony had predicted. You can borrow one book at a time and can keep it as long as you like but you can borrow a new book only once a month. Not ideal for the voracious reader but still a pretty good deal and who knows how the details of the plan will evolve in the future.
What interests me about this is not so much what it will mean for libraries—I’m pretty sure they will evolve to deal with the digitization of media—but what it means for publishers. The publishers, of course, hate the plan and none of the big six are participating according to an article by Jeffrey Trachtenberg and Stu Woo at the Wall Street Journal. Those that are participating are typically paid a flat fee by Amazon.
Doubtless the big publishing houses will resist as long as they can but in the end they will be dragged kicking and screaming into the program. Sadly, this is another missed opportunity for them. Rather than accept the inevitable and find a new business model that leverages what Amazon and others are doing, they continue to try to fend off the forces of change.
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Amazon is already storming the ramparts of the publishing industry and if the big houses can’t find a place in the new ecology they will surely wither and die. I’ve said before that I hope that doesn’t happen but, really, time is running short.
Update: Mathew Ingram has a nice analysis on this over at Gigaom that’s well worth a read.