Amazon To Rent Kindle Books?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting Amazon is considering a service to rent out books for Kindle owners. Would you be willing to rent for the ride?

In a model similar to Netflix, Amazon members would sign up to rent books for an annual fee. They would then in turn be able to rent out digital books from Amazon's library, a handful at a time. Sounds good doesn't it?

It peaks my interest but I'm not sold on the idea, just yet.

Giving people options is a good thing and doing it by distinguishing yourself from the crowd is a winning proposition. Its like going to the grocery store and seeing two brands of potato chips. The grocery store brand and the named brand. In some cases the named brand is the supplier of the grocery store brand - just different packaging. The idea is to give people a choice when it really is the same thing. Its a value/sales volume proposition. The potato chip company makes money and so does the grocer. Their motivation is to see if they can sell more at a lower price while reaping higher profits on the perception of quality and trust.

If done wrong, Amazon's book rental service would resemble something like Google Books. If you ever visited and perused through the site, you will quickly find it's nothing more than old free books that have been digitized and intermingled with new pay-for titles. Disappointing is that Google does not provide a Kindle file format. Kindle users know that PDF looks butt ugly and it takes too much effort to zoom in and out. Still, if you are looking for an older work, Google will likely have it.

And if done right, I would want the entire Amazon inventory to be available to rent, not just a limited selection of old books. No one wants to read older books that you can pick up at the local library for free. Sure, the lure is the matter of convenience of pressing a button and having the book delivered to your Kindle device. But I want the best of breed, not some cut down version of renting out books from an inventory I have no interest in. Example? War and Peace. its not actually a great dinner conversation to work into when you can talk about the current Steven Covey or Joel Osteen book.

So please Amazon, do it right. And book publishers, I feel your hesitation. Its hard to prove that you can make more money through rental than at full price. But the opportunity may lie in selling more to a different kind of consumer, at a lower price. Just like the grocery brand of potato chips.

About Kerry Kobashi

Kerry is the founder of KerryOnWorld. He lives in Silicon Valley and has worked as an engineer and project manager. He owns Kobashi Computing a consulting company.