Seth Godin, who has lots of advice for everyone and sometimes some good stuff, thinks Amazon should come up with a subscription plan for books.
While we’re at it, why shouldn’t Amazon be the central platform for buying subscriptions or one-time purchases of any kind of online content? They already run the world’s best information store – they’d make the buying experience easy, and bundle products/services together if it made sense for buyers. It would get publishers out of the business of running their own expensive, clunky registration, access control and billing platforms. There are plenty of ugly technology issues that would have to be worked out, but not as ugly as the buying process is today for most online information customers.
And I’m not convinced that the Kindle is the only platform they could play this role – why not on the Web too?
