All-you-can-read e-book services: maybe it’s time to swap bookcase for a subscription

Australians have another way of saving cash just by reading. See how it works.

Are you ready to replace your bookshelf with an all-you-can-read service?

That’s the question being posed by Australia’s second e-book subscription offering, launched in time for the busy summer reading period.

And experts say Australians are likely to embrace the concept, following the growing success of audiobooks and a spike in e-book use during the pandemic.

Rakuten Kobo has become the latest company to offer one-price access to a giant online library, giving Australian subscribers access to more than 580,000 books through Kobo Plus.

A monthly e-book subscription costs $13.99 — the same price as Kindle Unlimited, offered in Australia by tech giant rival Amazon.

Both offer big-name titles such as Pachinko by Min Jin Lee and Life of Pi by Yann Martel, as well as thousands of independent and classic tomes.

The Kobo Libra 2 is an e-book reader with a seven-inch screen and Bluetooth connection for playing audiobooks.

Rakuten Kobo Australia and New Zealand content lead Nick Coveney says the new all-you-can-read services offer something different to one-off purchases: an easy way to discover new authors and books.

“The thing that e-book subscriptions offer is really a chance for people to broaden their reading horizons,” he says.

“One of the challenges that people have historically faced is that unless they’ve already found an author they love, they don’t know where to begin. They end up to falling into certain series because they don’t know if they’re going to find something different.”

Mr Coveney says data from the Netherlands, where Kobo Plus launched in 2017, also shows subscription book services create “more voracious readers,” inspire new reading patterns, and encourage more people to pick up an e-book for the first time.

And he says more publishers and providers will have to embrace subscription services to keep up with the Netflix model of entertainment.

Kobo has launched a subscription service for e-books that can be accessed on the Kobo Sage and, a smartphone and via a tablet app.

“We’re not just competing with other book retailers: we’re competing for consumers’ attention,” he says.

Telyste managing director Foad Fadaghi says he expects e-book subscriptions to prove popular in Australia.

“There’s no reason why the e-book subscription market should not succeed like others before it, whether it’s for music, video or, increasingly, gaming,” he says.

“E-books have been established in Australia for a long time.”

Telsyte research shows Aussies are already enthusiastic audiobook users, with the firm finding more than one million people subscribed to an audiobook service in June 2021.

More than four million Australians currently download and digest digital books, according to Statista, in a market expected to generate more than $146m this year.

And that’s in addition to e-book loans that spiked during the pandemic.

OverDrive, the digital reading platform serving more than 1000 public and school libraries, reported that e-book and audiobook loans had soared by 41 per cent during 2020; even more than the worldwide growth rate of 33 per cent.

THREE OF THE BEST NEW E-BOOK READERS

Kobo Sage

$440, au.kobobooks.com

This advanced e-book reader offers much more than you’d expect. Its eight-inch touchscreen not only shows text in high definition, for example, but it’s compatible with a stylus you can use to scribble on your e-book or write notes. The Sage also features Bluetooth so you can listen to audiobooks through headphones, it’s waterproof, and it will automatically adjust lighting to suit your room and the time of day.

Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition

$289, amazon.com.au

The Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition features a waterproof body and auto-adjusting light.

The new Signature edition of Amazon’s Paperwhite e-book reader doesn’t look very different to the original but it adds plenty of good-to-have features. They include wireless charging, a USB-C port, beefed-up storage of 32GB, and a sensor to automatically adjust the screen illumination. This 6.8-inch device is also waterproof and will let you read in landscape mode.

Kobo Libra 2

$280, au.kobobooks.com

Sitting in the middle of Kobo’s e-book reader range, this device will let you connect Bluetooth headphones to listen to audiobooks, like more expensive models, but will still give you change from $300. The reader also features a seven-inch screen with adjustable lighting, 32GB memory, waterproof form, and can be flipped on to its side for landscape reading, and held there with a folding cover.

Originally published as All-you-can-read e-book services: maybe it’s time to swap bookcase for a subscription