The e-book subscription-service
bandwagon is starting to get pretty crowded. Oyster and Scribd keep growing and
Amazon recently launched its Kindle Unlimited program, which provides assess to
around 600,000 e-titles for $9.95 a month.
Now, Apple may be angling to get
into the game, according to Andrew Rhomberg, founder of the start-up Jellybooks,
which is focused on sampling and sharing e-books. Rhomberg predicted in a
Digital Book World article that Apple’s purchase of the e-book recommendation service BookLamp earlier
this year could have the company launching a subscription service before the
end of the year.
Subscription services must find ways
to keep customers paying the monthly fee, and recommendations put interesting
things to listen, watch, or read in front of subscribers. It’s sometimes less about
the bestsellers and more about providing subscribers with the titles in which they
are most likely interested, which is where the algorithms used by the
recommendation services come into play.
“Serving up relevant recommendations
(and sometimes that means genre fiction rather than literary fiction) is
critical to keeping subscribers engaged,” Rhomberg wrote. “Thus the acquisition
of BookLamp by Apple could possibly herald Apple’s entry into e-book
subscription services.”
