Amazon is the largest company that offers unlimited service, where, for a low monthly fee, you can access more than 4 million digital books, as well as thousands of audiobooks, comics, and magazines. Once you activate your subscription, you can download titles from the Kindle Unlimited catalogue immediately. Rakuten Kobo has a similar program; however, they split it up so users can access audiobooks, ebooks or both. Scribd is one of the best subscription platforms; Storytel has also done gangbuster business in this space. Should Apple do its own unlimited audio and ebook program?
Apple started to sell ebooks in 2010 and later began to sell audiobooks. Apple Books is the only solution for buying digital content on your iPhone or iPad. This is because all the big bookstores don’t want to pay the Apple tax for each book they sell on iOS, so Kindle, Kobo, Nook and all other apps can’t be used to buy content within the app. Instead, it would be best to load Safari, visit the site, buy a book and then sync it with the app. Apple Books is the sole big-name app that can be used to purchase content within the app, making the entire process easy.
Apple does have a subscription program, but it is only for Apple News+, which gives users access to previous news articles and hundreds of magazines by some of the world top publishers. This only recently launched in 2019, and Apple has not released any sales figures on how well it is doing.
It would be suitable for Apple to include self-published ebooks in Apple News+. The company gets many titles sent to them through aggregators such as Smashwords or Draftodigital, and Apple always has their solution via iTunes Producer. Including these titles in Apple News+ would be a straightforward process. It would be a challenge to get publishers on board. Amazon does the same thing. Kindle Unlimited primarily has books submitted via Kindle Direct Publishing or their imprints, so most of KU’s authors are authors you have never heard of.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.