Netflix for Books?

I recently read an intriguing article from Wired about the unveiling of a subscription service for short story e-books. The service was announced by the UK bookstore, Waterstones, and according to the article, there's another such streaming e-book service currently operating called F+W Media, which caters to romance genre enthusiasts. I'd never heard of a subscription service for books before, but one can imagine the possibilities if subscription e-book services were to take off.

The first thing that struck me was that these subscription models are currently catering toward specific genre audiences, which seems like a shrewd decision. As the Wired piece notes, while it might be easy to watch a few dozen episodes of a TV show on Netflix in a month, it's not as easy to read several books in a month. Therefore, the subscription model makes more sense for people who are heavy-readers and can read through books quickly--which is exactly the case for romance novel readers and short story lovers. There are other genres that might fit the delivery model criteria: thrillers, mysteries, true-crime, and maybe fantasy and sci-fi (although some of these books are very large). I'm sure there are other groups of readers too that might benefit from a subscription service.

But I'm not quite as optimistic as Wired that e-book subscriptions will flourish in the long-term because of the fleeting nature of the delivery model and the lack of broad-based appeal that subscription models have beyond niche markets. For example, what if I like owning my books and being able to look back on them? Will I be able to review the passages I highlighted or notes I made in the margins with a subscription plan? And what about readers who like literary fiction or non-fiction books; how would this service be made appealing to them?

Also worth considering are the tricky logistics of setting up subscriber networks. A critical question for me is how many people will be able to "check out" a title at once? If only so many people can read a title at once (and I suspect that will be the case given our current intellectual property laws and licensing agreements), are private companies just creating their own parallel digital queues for popular e-books, as currently exists for popular public library e-books?

As titilating of an idea as a Netflix for books might sound to bibliophiles, for the reasons I've cited above, I think we're still years away before we'll have a multi-genre, multi-publisher, wide-reaching e-book subscription service available to use on our e-readers and tablets. But there are reasons for optimism for the success of the subscription based model. The Kindle Lending Library, which makes 300,000 books available to Amazon Prime users who own Kindles, is certainly a service that deserves attention. I have Amazon Prime, but I don't own a Kindle, so I'm curious to hear what users of the Kindle Lending Library think. I could be way off the mark here. As with all technological speculation, only time will tell.