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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.
BookLender's model is similar to the popular DVD's by mail movie rental model of Netflix, only BookLender's service provides books and audiobooks, not DVD movies. Started around the time Netflix started nearly 12 years ago, BookLender provides unlimited online book and/or audiobook rental service to its members who enjoy the same savings, selection and convenience that Netflix provides for DVD movies. Oprah Magazine called BookLender the "books version of Netflix".
While there are many similarities between the BookLender and Netflix models, there are also many differences. Books, and audiobooks are larger and heavier than DVD movies. BookLender ships multiple books per order Media Mail with the exception of one membership and sends its audiobooks individually via First Class Mail. Another major difference is that books and audiobooks provide many more hours of entertainment than movies. The average length of a movie is just under 2 hours, while the average length of a book is around 12 hours.
Here are some testimonials that BookLender has received over the years that mention our similarity to Netflix:
Copyright 2000 - 2021 BookLender.com. BookLender.com is proudly maintained by Vive le Livre LLC (that's French for "Long Live the Book!'), a Quirkus Inc. company. All rights reserved Privacy Policy Terms of Use
Each plan limits the number of items that can be checked out at any one time. Subscribers can pay a higher monthly fee in order to increase that limit. It is also possible to rent individual titles without having any membership plan. The only problem is that they are still much smaller than some of their competitors, their unique offerings is what keeps them from falling apart.
Oyster was a relatively new upstart compared to many of the other players in the same market. It charged a monthly fee of $9.99 for access to over one million e-books. They operated on a model that paid the publishers a retail cut for e-books read by their subscribers.
The deal was actually worse than most of the other companies and they offered very little that made them unique. Entitle was far too small to hold its own in as an e-book subscription service company and failed to carve out a niche.
What is new is the technology used to dispense the books. It used to be that a book vending machine could only dispense the amount of books it can contain. But with new computer technology, a machine could have a database containing millions of books and use a printing press inside the machine to print a book within about ten minutes.
I recently ordered a new e-reader. The biggest decision was not so much which specific device to buy, but rather which ecosystem to marry into. Will the device I buy tie me to the Kindle ecosystem or the Kobo ecosystem? And which one is better?
Kobo, being originally a Canadian company, fares much better in Canada, by allowing people to borrow ebooks from the public library through Overdrive directly from the device, making the process even smoother than the one experienced by American Kindle users.
Nevertheless, if you are an American reader, Kindle is a no-brainer, unless you have ideological reasons against getting an Amazon device. This is why it is estimated that over 83% of ebook readers in the US are Kindles.
This way you could have the Kindle catalog and the ability to borrow library books, even in Canada. However, these devices tend to be quite a bit more expensive than even the top of the line Kindle or Kobo, they are not exactly bug-free, and perhaps they lose something by adding more capabilities.
If you are looking for an e-reader, less might be more. Part of the beauty of a device like the Kindle and Kobo lies in their distraction-free nature. The devices are simply not capable of doing much else but reading.
Antonio Cangiano is an Engineering Manager and AI Specialist at IBM. He authored Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers (Wrox, 2009) and Technical Blogging (The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2012, 2019). He is also the Marketing Lead for Cognitive Class, an educational initiative which he helped grow from zero to over 3 Million students. You can follow him on Twitter.
Thanks for this article Antonio. I was pretty sure to get the Kindle Paperwhite but after watching your video clip and reading the article I will be going for a Kobo device (as a good Canadian). I primarily read in bed before going to sleep. Which device do you recommend?
Thank you, Katherine. Kobo has currently 531,130 books in French. Kindle is supposed to have more (i.e., 800K+), but there are two caveats: 1) How many of these are available in the Canadian Kindle Store? 2) How many of these are low-quality self-published titles?
My recommendation would be for you to write down a list of 10 books in French that you want to read. Include some less popular titles in there, too. Then see how many of these are available on Kobo and how many on Amazon. And while you are there, you can also compare pricing. That should help you assess a little better which of the two would work best for your specific circumstances.
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