As I've said in other contexts, I simply will not purchase a subscription to each of ABC, NBC, CBS, Discovery, HBO, Showtime, etc etc and those guys can just forget that dream.
Books are a bit different than those media wars, though, because they are something one buys in discrete units. If I can pop the name of the book or author into Google and land on one or another reasonably well-done website by the publisher, and they come to some sort of agreement on DRM in the manner of something like Bluray (which is to say, it is not mandatory that every company uses its own DRM and there is prior art for industry-wide agreements), it matters much less to me that I buy one book from X and another from Y. It isn't harmless, but it isn't the fatal objection I think it is for any industry with 15 different entities all trying to work out how to carve a $9.95/month subscription fee each out of me.
Where I feel like video needs something like Netflix or Amazon to serve as a subscription aggregator and to manage cash flow conversion from subscriptions to per-watch fees transparently, it seems like publisher websites and Google (as a search engine, not some new service) might be sufficient for ebooks.
Books are a bit different than those media wars, though, because they are something one buys in discrete units. If I can pop the name of the book or author into Google and land on one or another reasonably well-done website by the publisher, and they come to some sort of agreement on DRM in the manner of something like Bluray (which is to say, it is not mandatory that every company uses its own DRM and there is prior art for industry-wide agreements), it matters much less to me that I buy one book from X and another from Y. It isn't harmless, but it isn't the fatal objection I think it is for any industry with 15 different entities all trying to work out how to carve a $9.95/month subscription fee each out of me.
Where I feel like video needs something like Netflix or Amazon to serve as a subscription aggregator and to manage cash flow conversion from subscriptions to per-watch fees transparently, it seems like publisher websites and Google (as a search engine, not some new service) might be sufficient for ebooks.
If the book publishers get their act together.
...
So never mind, I guess.