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Candi Ruman
Ebooks have not swept away traditional tomes the way streaming services for music, movies, and TV shows have slashed sales of discs. Physical book sales are booming, but ebooks and audiobooks have a dedicated, appreciative audience. If you love to read, an ebook subscription service is a great way to discover new titles, find recommendations, and read more indie books. We tried out several of the most popular options, delving into their available libraries, apps, and features to determine the best ebook subscription services and audiobook subscriptions for different people.
While an ebook subscription might sound ideal, you should take some time to consider the pros and cons of each one. These digital reading services are often billed as the equivalent of Netflix or Spotify for books, and there are similarities, but ebook subscriptions also have some unexpected restrictions.
The big five publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster) dominate the bestseller charts in the US but have had limited dealings with ebook subscription services so far. Current best-seller lists are not well represented, and the modest list of mainstream hits that appears mostly comprises older titles. Whatever service you are considering, we advise browsing the available library of ebooks and audiobooks before you commit.
Reading Habits: If you only read one or two books a month, you might be better off buying popular titles, recommendations from trusted friends, or works by your favorite authors. That way, you get to choose the best ebooks and keep them. With ebook subscriptions, you lose access the moment you stop subscribing, and the library of available books can change at any time without notice.
Voracious readers who are happy to try new and unfamiliar authors will likely get the most value from ebook subscriptions. But while these services are typically described as unlimited, they often do have hidden limits. This is where they differ from services like Spotify and Netflix. With Scribd, for example, the available library is reduced when you hit opaque limits.
On the downside, there are limits to your monthly reading. Frustratingly, the rules are not clear. If you hit the limit, access is restricted to a smaller subset until the next month begins, and some titles are labeled Available Soon. While the formatting for ebooks is generally good, some magazine formatting is poor. Everand has also raised prices twice since I first tried it and scrapped the perks program that gave you additional subscriptions to services like Curiosity Stream. It is also harder than it should be to cancel Scribd, and you don't get a warning when your free trial ends, so set a reminder.
The new Plus subscription makes Audible more affordable, and offers a more traditional subscription model where you can listen as much as you want but you do lose access when you stop paying. The pricey Premium Plus plan is the previous membership model, and you can also opt for a two credits per month plan at $23 per month ($230/year) now.
Spotify tops our best music streaming services guide with slick performance, handy music discovery algorithms, and an expansive library of over 100 million tracks and 5 million podcasts. To sweeten that pot further, Premium subscribers in the US, UK, and Australia can now access a library of more than 200,000 audiobooks and listen for up to 15 hours a month as part of their existing subscription. Open the audiobook hub, and you will find many best sellers (Spotify says 70 percent of bestselling titles) and titles from the big five publishers alongside audiobooks from independent publishers and authors. As with music, there are curated recommendations, categories, and playlists.
While there are a few graphic novels on some ebook subscription services, the choice tends to be limited. By far the best option for comic book fans, ComiXology Unlimited gives you access to thousands of comics and graphic novels from all of the major publishers, including DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse. The website and mobile apps are straightforward and sync progress across devices. While you can read on a smartphone, you are better off with a good tablet, laptop, or desktop to enjoy the high-resolution art. The Unlimited service is a great way to discover new comics, and the app recommends titles the more you use it.
BookBeat: For folks in the UK or Europe, BookBeat is a slick audiobook service with a decent choice and a unique subscription model. After 30 days or 30 hours of listening (whichever comes first) your free trial is over and it costs 6 a month for 20 hours, 10 a month for 50 hours, or 15 a month for 100 hours.
BookBub: Sign up for free to get alerts on discounted ebooks with this service. You can specify genres and authors you are interested in and get daily or weekly emails with links to buy heavily discounted ebooks.
Bookmate: While it boasts a large library of ebooks, audiobooks, and comics, many are out of copyright. There's a seven-day free trial, then it costs $10 per month, but the choice is not as varied as with Scribd.
Monthly "all you can eat" subscription services are now mainstream for music, movies, and TV. Will they be as popular for e-books as well? A move made recently by New York-based startup Oyster casts some doubt on this. Oyster recently launched a traditional e-book retail feature, which complements the $10/month subscription e-book service that the company first launched over a year and a half ago.
Subscription music services came into being in the very early days of digital music. Two services, MusicNet and pressplay, launched in late 2001. Each had music from three of the five major record companies at the time (EMI licensed its material to both services). In the middle of the following year, the startup Listen.com was able to get music from all five majors for its Rhapsody service. In other words, it took less than a year for on-demand music services to attract all of the major record labels.
The story with subscription on-demand video services was quite different. Netflix started its online video service in 2007 with a small catalog of non-major-studio film titles; it took Netflix five years to get recent releases from major studios. Even now, Netflix (as well as Hulu and other similar services) is often criticized for the lack of depth in its catalog.
Scribd is considerably older than Oyster. It started in 2007 as sort of a "YouTube for documents," then added a retail store in 2009. Anyone could put their documents up for sale on the site; it also began to attract commercial book publishers, starting with Simon & Schuster later that year. Scribd launched its subscription offering in October 2013 with support from HarperCollins, just weeks after the launch of Oyster. Scribd has stated that the subscription service is much more popular than its a-la-carte store, which is why it markets the subscription service more heavily.
Yet Oyster's new Ebook Store offers e-books from all five major trade publishers as well as hundreds of smaller publishers. Why did Oyster add traditional retail to its subscription service? Is Oyster's subscribership perhaps not growing as quickly as the company (or its investors, including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund) would like? Is this a strategic "pivot"?
None of these companies publish subscriber figures, and indeed it's too early to draw any long-term conclusions. It's also important to take into consideration the fact that book publishers behave more like movie studios than like record labels when it comes to the practice of "windowing." Major film studios don't make movies available for home (through services like Netflix, on DVD or Blu-ray, etc.) use until months after their theatrical release. Record labels have no such policies (though some would like to). Trade book publishers do typically engage in a kind of windowing by publishing books in more expensive hardcover first and then, months later (if at all), in cheaper paperback. Therefore the notion of not making "frontlist" titles available via certain e-book services should come naturally to book publishers.
Still, the fact that two of the major trade publishers are not licensing their titles to any subscription e-book services tells a story about publishers' reluctance to embrace the subscription market. This is in line with the major publishers' behavior towards e-book startups: the majors have never been known to make their titles available to new startups without significant audiences. Instead, they wait for startups to accumulate audiences through user-generated or indie-publisher content, then they jump on board. That was certainly the case for Scribd, which had accumulated 80 million visitors when HarperCollins signed onto its subscription service.
But the question remains of whether consumers are interested in the "grazing" model of media consumption that all-you-can-eat on-demand services facilitate. It's clear by now that a significant segment of the Internet population likes that model for music, despite the rising interest in music ownership on vinyl LPs.
Yet one set of data tells a story of different consumption patterns between music and e-books that could affect the way these services develop in the future. Subscription music services have been displacing digital downloads of music from services like Apple iTunes, as unit volume from the latter category has shifted into steep decline. But the same is not true for e-books, as the following graph shows:
Add to this the fact that physical book sales -- unlike sales of music CDs -- are fairly stable, and one can conclude that the reading public doesn't get subscription e-book services -- or at least doesn't get them yet.
How long will it take before we know for sure? Even though all of the major record labels licensed content to Rhapsody back in 2002, it took until 2011 for subscription music services to reach beyond a niche audience. One reason for this was lack of reliable high-speed mobile Internet access during the early 2000s, which made downloads the only reasonable way to get digital music that people could listen to on portable devices. But another reason was the newness of the consumption model. Subscription music went mainstream thanks to the massive media hype around Spotify's launch combined with the music industry's realization that an already hugely popular content platform -- YouTube -- served as a de facto on-demand music service.
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