Amazon Prime Books

I’m not sure how I feel about the news that Amazon is trying to form add a “Netflix like” service for e-books to it’s Amazon Prime. On the consumer side, since I’m already an Amazon Prime member, having free access to a bunch of books might be cool. Any time you want to read something new, just download it without having to worry about price.

As an aspiring writer, I’m quite hesitant. Author share of profit from book sales are already small. With the rise of self-publication, what would a collection of free big name books do to the self-publication market? Right now, the Kindle is a good market for self-publication. You can easily get books for a low price. Makes people more inclined to try an unknown author out. If all the Amazon Prime member suddenly get a huge library of free books, less people will be willing to pay $3 for an unknown author.

Even before I seriously thought about becoming a writer, I’ve always been a fan of buying books. Unlike movies, I prefer owning a book to renting one. Even if I do only read it that one time. I love public libraries and fully support those, but that’s a different animal all together.

Will people who e-publish on Amazon be able to get their books added to the list of free choices? If so, how will they be compensated? If not, how will that affect the recent boom in self-publication? Lot’s of questions to consider. Since this is only something Amazon is trying to do, and not something they’ve already implemented, we have time to see what happens.