The American company for electronic commerce for cultural products, Amazon, has just announced an offer that risks accelerating the change in consumption and production habits in the world of book.
“Unlimited” affects the field of book
Entitled Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s offer in the United States offers unlimited access to a library of 600,000 pounds, for a monthly subscription of around $ 10. This new configuration may not only have the reading mode and also that of the distribution of copyrights. Will readers be in mass to this dematerialized library? Will Amazon not have hegemonic ambitions on books? What about booksellers? And how will the rights of authors be divided between Amazon, publishing houses and writers? These are the main questions that arise in front of this new cultural and economic model that does not please sixty American writers accusing Amazon, in an open letter, of taking books hostage.
A model modeled on Netflix
This economic model is actually modeled in particular on the video on demand giant, Netflix. The success of this American company, which had 44 million subscribers in 50 countries in 2013, was dazzling from 2010. One of the flagship works provided by Netflix was the political series House of Cards, including the continuous flow mode on an internet platform, was innovative and very successful in several countries.
It remains to be seen whether this dematerialized model will work on the book which we predict, since the birth of the Internet, the disappearance of physical support.
