According to the Wall Street Journal, online giant Amazon is in talks with multiple book publishers about launching an online book rental service that would be similar to what Netflix does for movies.
Amazon is currently creating a digital library of mainly older works and the proposed online library would offer users access to content for an annual fee, with restrictions on the amount of books that could be borrowed each month. Amazon’s popular Kindle e-reader would obviously benefit from such a rental service.
There are not too many early details available, but we can already report that several publishers are unhappy with the idea. Publishers think that the proposed Amazon service would cut down the amount of people who buy books and also hurt their relationships with other distributors.
We will see what happens, but it is definitely an interesting idea. Netflix has become a giant, and one can only assume that if Amazon launches something like this it would probably be successful.