For those of you nostalgic for the wonderful PBS show Reading Rainbow will be happy to hear that the former show's producer and host, LeVar Burton, is launching RRKidz, a line of digital interactive children's books. RRKidz will be available as a subscription service through a free app for the IPad and select Android devices.
What's really exciting is that the list of titles (300 to start, with 45 added each month) will be curated by Burton himself, making it easy for parents and kids to find eBooks they like. The titles will be a combination of offerings from publishers and original content. Look for RRKidz to debut toward the end of 2011 or early 2012.
One goal Burton has for RRKidz is to raise the profile of quality backlist titles that might otherwise not get turned into digital formats by their publishers. You've got to love any venture that keeps great children's books alive and brings them to the attention of parents and kids.
According to GalleyCat, Amazon is considering adopting a Netflix-like model that would allow customers to rent eBooks for a subscription fee. Publishers, of course, aren't exactly leaping on board. Some worry that this would "downgrade the value of the book business." Others feel renting eBooks from the cloud would give the impression that books have little inherent worth.
What do you think? Libraries already have built-in expiration dates to their eBooks, making them vanish from your e-reader after three weeks. Amazon could engineer their rental books the same way. If the ability to rent books for a fee brings down their value, what have libraries been doing all these years where patrons can read for free?
And then of course there's Netflix. Somehow the movie industry has survived with streaming, on-demand movie services offering hundreds of movies for one monthly fee. Has this cheapened movies as a whole, or has it made all movies (independent and major studio releases alike) more accessible to everyone?
Of course Amazon would have to fairly pay publishers and authors for the eBooks to be rented (which is what publishers are really worried about when they talk about "value"). And the royalty will likely be less per book for rentals, but presumably the difference will be made up with an increased volume of readers. From the author's perspective, if more people are reading your books, doesn't that raise the value of everything you write?
That's my opinion. I'd love to hear yours.
Cloud Computing + Books = ?
Sometimes change happens so quickly and so naturally that we miss something profound. Something obvious.
If you have Netflix and a device to stream it through your TV, you know exactly what I'm talking about. For 8 bucks a month, Netflix gives us thousands of movies and TV shows on demand, often in high-def. In a matter of months, Netflix has all but made video stores and those movie rental boxes obsolete. It's also made buying individual DVDs seem old-fashioned and pointless.
Now think about books. We know eBooks will be the dominant platform moving forward, and we know that eReaders (or, more likely, tablet computers that read eBooks) will be as common as cell phones in a few years.
Now put these facts together.
Is it possible that, in the near future, selling individual books to individual consumers will be the exception, not the rule? Is it possible that readers will join a Netflix-like "all you can eat" cloud-based service and have unlimited access to thousands of books at any given time?
For authors, revenue can be earned in a number of ways: one time rights acquisition by the service; a per-use payment; shared advertising revenue…or something entirely new. Freed from the task of launching and marketing their books, authors can focus on writing and building their tribes of readers.
Amazon has invested heavily in cloud computing and seems the perfect candidate to launch such a service. Or perhaps there's a new visionary out there ready to make it happen. Either way, keep your eyes peeled.
And look to the clouds.
