As E-Book Subscription Services Grow Their Catalogs, the Age-Old Institution Trumps All
by: Geoffrey A FowlerA growing stack of companies would like you to pay a monthly fee to read e-books, just like you subscribe to Netflix to binge on movies and TV shows.
Don't bother. Go sign up for a public library card instead.
Really, the public library? Amazon.com recently launched Kindle Unlimited, a $10-per-month service offering loans of 600,000 e-books. Startups called Oyster and Scribd offer something similar. It isn't very often that a musty old institution can hold its own against tech disrupters.
But it turns out librarians haven't just been sitting around shushing people while the Internet drove them into irrelevance. Over 90% of American public libraries have amassed e-book collections you can read on your iPad, and often even on a Kindle. You don't have to walk into a branch or risk an overdue fine. And they're totally free.
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| Publishers have come to see libraries not only as a source of income, but also as a marketing vehicle. Emily Prapuolenis/The Wall Street Journal |
Though you still have to deal with due dates, hold lists and occasionally clumsy software, libraries, at least for now, have one killer feature that the others don't: e-books you actually want to read.
To compare, I dug up best-seller lists, as well as best-of lists compiled by authors and critics. Then I searched for those e-books in Kindle Unlimited, Oyster and Scribd alongside my local San Francisco Public Library. To rule out big-city bias, I also checked the much smaller library where I grew up in Richland County, S.C.
Of the Journal's 20 most recent best-selling e-books in fiction and nonfiction, Amazon's Kindle Unlimited has none—no "Fifty Shades of Grey," no "The Fault in Our Stars." Scribd and Oyster each have a paltry three. But the San Francisco library has 15, and my South Carolina library has 11.
From Amazon's own top-20 Kindle best-seller lists from 2013, 2012 and 2011, Kindle Unlimited has no more than five titles a year, while the San Francisco library has at least 16.
Stephen King AFP/Getty Images
Of Stephen King's 2012 list of his all-time10 favorite books, Amazon and the other subscription services have four, including classics such as George Orwell's "1984" and Charles Dickens's "Bleak House." But the San Francisco library has all of those, as well as Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" and William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" for a total of eight. (My South Carolina library also only has four.)
You will certainly find things to read on all of these paid services. For $9 per month, Scribd offers a slightly superior browsing experience and collection, especially if you're the kind of reader who goes deep into a genre. Of one critic's list of the "10 best vampire novels no one has read," Scribd has four, while Oyster has three and Amazon has none. My South Carolina library has two, but the San Francisco library just has one.
But who needs to pay for a "Netflix for books" subscription? I am a little awed by binge book readers. Still, not everyone is so voracious that they could guarantee reading $120 worth of e-books in a year.
How They Stack Up
E-book subscription services don't always have the big-name e-books available at some public libraries. Below, a comparison in the availability of books on three services—Oyster, Kindle Unlimited and Scribd—with the public libraries in San Francisco and Richland County, S.C. We compared Amazon's top 20 best-sellers on Kindle from 2013, as well as a more esoteric list of author Stephen King's 10 favorites.
Another argument against shelling out for Kindle Unlimited comes from Amazon itself: If you own a Kindle device and subscribe to Amazon Prime, you already get one e-book loan a month as part of the service.
The subscription companies say their services are designed to let you try more books without the barrier of committing to buy. But none of these services yet feel as complete as Spotify, the $10-per-month all-you-can-eat music streaming service I used to explore the latest Miley Cyrus album without the regret of buying it.
How did library e-book collections get such a leg up? Amazon is locked in ahate-hate relationship with many publishers, so none of the five largest will sell their whole collection to Amazon for its subscription service. (Amazon bought a few big titles like the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series, has 500 books already in the public domain and pads out the rest with back-catalog and self-published books to reach the 600,000 tally it touts.) And so far only two of the big publishers will sell even part of their collections to startups Oyster and Scribd.
Over at the library, the situation is different. All of the big five publishers sell their e-book collections for loans, usually on the same day they're available for consumers to purchase. They haven't always been so friendly with libraries, and still charge them a lot for e-books. Some library e-books are only allowed a set number of loans before "expiring."
Publishers have come to see libraries not only as a source of income, but also as a marketing vehicle. Since the Internet has killed off so many bookstores, libraries have become de facto showrooms for discovering books.
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| Children at the Richland Library in Columbia, S.C., use the library's eReady Bar, where librarians help them access and use digital collections. Joey LeRoy/Richland Library |
I have a soft spot for public libraries. I grew up reading at the one where my mom, now retired, worked. Like many, I hadn't used my library card much since I started reading books on screens. But in the past few weeks, discovering my library's e-book collection helped me reconnect with the power of the library card I felt when I was young.
It's easier than you might think. At the typical public library, you need only log in with your card number and a PIN to its e-book collection, then search through the online catalog.
During online checkout, many will give you the choice to zap your borrowed book directly to a Kindle reader, a tablet or phone app, or a computer screen. When it's time to "return" the e-book, it just disappears.
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| A reading tablet at a library in San Francisco. Emily Prapuolenis/The Wall Street Journal |
In exchange for this free access, you have to accept a bit more hassle. Your loans may expire after 21 days or less, but you can recheck them out. Some libraries have multiple e-book collections that you have to search and learn to use. Most aren't as pretty as Scribd or Oyster, which let you scroll through large images of book covers to find something that suits your fancy.
The most legitimate argument against libraries is the wait list: About half the e-books I surveyed were checked out. This required placing a "hold" that could last a few weeks, or sometimes even months. The smaller your library, the less likely it could afford extra digital copies. (San Francisco's library has some tech books and travel guides where publishers allow unlimited simultaneous checkouts.)
What's available will depend on your community tax dollars—many libraries took a hit in the last recession. Some communities have banded together to create larger e-libraries; for example, all Colorado residents can use the Denver Public Library.
Libraries' current collection advantage, borne of those publisher contracts, isn't likely to last forever. Publishers may resolve their squabbles with Amazon or come to see paid subscriptions as a lucrative new market. What would happen to libraries if they truly had to go head-to-head with Amazon? Ultimately, the winner will be the service that offers the most convenient access to the best array of e-books.
But libraries serve nobler purposes than just amassing vampire romances. They provide equal access to knowledge, from employment services to computer training. And in an age where getting things "free" usually means surrendering some privacy, libraries have long been careful about protecting patron records.
The rise of paid subscription services is proof that there's demand for what libraries can offer in our Internet era
from: Wall Street Journal
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