Pay a monthly fee and in exchange be able to read one or more ebooks at no extra cost – what is known as The Subscription Model.  Or Ebook of the Month Clubs?

As my faithful readers will know (post on Amazon Prime), Amazon have just launched something like a subscription scheme as an addition to their Prime Membership deal, but this is very limited, both geographically (only for the USA) and in terms of content as well, only having about 5000 ebooks to choose from.

The only other version of this idea that I can bring to mind just now is a small start up in Spain, called 24 Symbols, which offers subscribers the opportunity to read on a computer or smart phone ebooks that are stored on a Cloud, and thus not downloaded onto the reader’s device.

Probably a nice idea, as far as it goes, but so far they apparently only have about 1000 ebooks on offer, all of which are from the public domain, so in other words, ebooks that you can get for yourself at no cost from sites like Gutenberg.

They are offering several schemes, free reading with advertisements, pay a monthly fee and you get the ebooks without advertisements.

Personally I don’t really see the benefit of this sort of scheme, as there is nothing in it for the big publishers, so they are not joining in with this, so the choice of ebooks remains very limited, and from the deeper levels of ebookania.

Ebook of the Month Club:

I suspect that an ebook version of Book of the Month type schemes is more likely to succeed, as it is interesting for publishers – their books get sold that way, and needs no advertising to support it, simply take the model of Book of the Month Club and replace the paper book with an ebook.. And there you have it.    A system that has proven itself over the years, infra-structure already in place, simply stop sending paper, and start sending data….

Link to 24 Symbols:  http://www.24symbols.com/

Link to Amazon’s ebook Prime: Click here

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So, subscription or Ebook of the Month, which would you prefer?