The content offering will determine success or failure here. Amazon chose to add what they could to Prime with the Kindle Owner Lending Library program. That’s a nice add-on since the Prime rate didn’t go up, but it’s missing all sorts of content.

I tend to think it’s best to focus on a specific genre. Don’t just serve up a bunch of content. Build and serve the community as well. I’m much more inclined to sign up for a subscription service featuring nothing but sports books than I would one where it’s super broad and sports is just one small piece of it. The same goes for all the other genres that appeal to each of us.

As an author of premium nonfiction ebooks (“Dropbox In 30 Minutes”, “Google Drive & Docs In 30 Minutes”, “Excel Basics In 30 Minutes”, etc.) I’m very concerned about any model that depends on free giveaways. For instance, the “free days” on Amazon’s KDP Select have turned into a joke. The last time I looked, my single KDP Select title delivered an average of 1 cent per download from the KDP Select fund. That’s about the same as many bands enjoy from Spotify each time someone plays one of their tracks, according to various sources.

I see from the linked article about Bookboard that the service is free during the public beta, and publishers are receiving nothing during this period. It’s supposed to switch to paid in 2013, but it’s not clear if it’s a Spotify-style freemium model. There is also no detail about how much authors will get for their work. I suspect it isn’t much.

And, we must not forget the probabilty that there might be less money to be made with selling digital media in comparison to physical media. Which, if that turns out to be the case, redefines what does work and what doesn’t. That is relative.

And, last but not least, Spotify turns out to be a (legal) alternative for piracy in music. So doing nothing (like that) at all, makes that you will lose money be keeping it the way you were doing already.

If it’s true that you can get the gist of any non-fiction book by just reading the first five pages, then why own a non-fiction e-book? As for fiction, would a Spotify book service benefit from building a sharing/referral capability to drive consumer take-up? Surely it’s a just a matter of time for an e-book access service model is ‘successful’ (even if its focused on a niche such as academia).

As for the supply-side, Is there an aggregration platform out there with a strong brand that enables ‘non published/independent’ writers engage with their audiences?

My initial thought is: Spotify books would be an interesting product extension and added value for bundled propositions

Secondly, a successful model already exists for audiobooks, called Audible subscriptions: http://www.audible.com/offers/