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Mirta Dozar
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.
I pulled this chapter together from dozens of sources that were at times somewhat contradictory. Facts on the ground change over time and depend who is telling the story and what audience they're addressing. I tried to create as coherent a narrative as I could. If there are any errors I'd be more than happy to fix them. Keep in mind this article is not a technical deep dive. It's a big picture type article. For example, I don't mention the word microservice even once :-)
Given our discussion in the What is Cloud Computing? chapter, you might expect Netflix to serve video using AWS. Press play in a Netflix application and video stored in S3 would be streamed from S3, over the internet, directly to your device.
Another relevant factoid is Netflix is subscription based. Members pay Netflix monthly and can cancel at any time. When you press play to chill on Netflix, it had better work. Unhappy members unsubscribe.
The client is the user interface on any device used to browse and play Netflix videos. It could be an app on your iPhone, a website on your desktop computer, or even an app on your Smart TV. Netflix controls each and every client for each and every device.
Everything that happens before you hit play happens in the backend, which runs in AWS. That includes things like preparing all new incoming video and handling requests from all apps, websites, TVs, and other devices.
In 2007 Netflix introduced their streaming video-on-demand service that allowed subscribers to stream television series and films via the Netflix website on personal computers, or the Netflix software on a variety of supported platforms, including smartphones and tablets, digital media players, video game consoles, and smart TVs.
Netflix succeeded. Netflix certainly executed well, but they were late to the game, and that helped them. By 2007 the internet was fast enough and cheap enough to support streaming video services. That was never the case before. The addition of fast, low-cost mobile bandwidth and the introduction of powerful mobile devices like smart phones and tablets, has made it easier and cheaper for anyone to stream video at any time from anywhere. Timing is everything.
Building out a datacenter is a lot of work. Ordering equipment takes a long time. Installing and getting all the equipment working takes a long time. And as soon they got everything working they would run out of capacity, and the whole process had to start over again.
The long lead times for equipment forced Netflix to adopt what is known as a vertical scaling strategy. Netflix made big programs that ran on big computers. This approach is called building a monolith. One program did everything.
What Netflix was good at was delivering video to their members. Netflix would rather concentrate on getting better at delivering video rather than getting better at building datacenters. Building datacenters was not a competitive advantage for Netflix, delivering video is.
It took more than eight years for Netflix to complete the process of moving from their own datacenters to AWS. During that period Netflix grew its number of streaming customers eightfold. Netflix now runs on several hundred thousand EC2 instances.
The advantage of having three regions is that any one region can fail, and the other regions will step in handle all the members in the failed region. When a region fails, Netflix calls this evacuating a region.
The header image is meant to intrigue you, to draw you into selecting a video. The idea is the more compelling the header image, the more likely you are to watch a video. And the more videos you watch, the less likely you are to unsubscribe from Netflix.
The first thing Netflix does is spend a lot of time validating the video. It looks for digital artifacts, color changes, or missing frames that may have been caused by previous transcoding attempts or data transmission problems.
A pipeline is simply a series of steps data is put through to make it ready for use, much like an assembly line in a factory. More than 70 different pieces of software have a hand in creating every video.
The idea behind a CDN is simple: put video as close as possible to users by spreading computers throughout the world. When a user wants to watch a video, find the nearest computer with the video on it and stream to the device from there.
In 2007, when Netflix debuted its new streaming service, it had 36 million members in 50 countries, watching more than a billion hours of video each month, streaming multiple terabits of content per second.
At the same time, Netflix was also devoting a lot of effort into all the AWS services we talked about earlier. Netflix calls the services in AWS its control plane. Control plane is a telecommunications term identifying the part of the system that controls everything else. In your body, your brain is the control plane; it controls everything else.
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