Some more information is coming to light about Amazon’s attempts to persuade publishers to support its Netflix-style lending e-library proposal for Amazon Prime. Reportedly, Amazon is telling publishers that only about 10% of Amazon Prime members own Kindles, so they shouldn’t be nervous about too many people reading their e-books for free.
Of course, this leaves aside the fact that you don’t have to own a hardware Kindle to read Kindle e-books. And that the availability of a sizable e-book library for Prime members could turn more of them into Kindle owners (or at least Kindle software users). It seems like a fairly disingenuous argument to me.
But on the other hand, it might very well work for all I know. PaidContent points out that Barnes & Noble allows Nook owners to read any book in the Nook library for an hour from any Barnes & Noble store. The Amazon idea might be different in scale, but not in principle.
