Google Book Rental ???
By Jeffrey Strain, November 14th, 2005 | 4 Comments »
There is a report in the Sunday Wall Street Journal that Google may be thinking about online book rentals. The proposed for a one week rental of a book online would be 10% of the book’s list price.
While this isn’t as cheap as going to the library, for someone like me living in Japan it would be a godsend. One of the things I miss most about living here is not having access to good books without them costing a small fortune. While reading a book on a computer isn’t as enjoyable as sitting down in a comfy chair to do the same, something would be better than nothing.
How it would be embraced by consumers that have access to a variety of inexpensive alternatives including the library is another question, but my gut feeling is that there would be a market there. If that is the case, I would assume that Amazon executives are scrambling to see if they can form their own deal – I don’t think that they would want Google stepping into what they consider their arena.
I will be interested to see how this develops…
I think it’s a silly idea
The only people who might like are those who need immediate gratification and don’t want to wait their turn at the library.
Oh, Rural people mike like it…. really, really rural people
humm… that is interesting — seems like google is getting themselves in pretty much everything eh? My friend Russell today told me that Google just launched some sort of web stats service — the funny thing is I recently set my homepage back to Yahoo! — I find I am actually able to find better sites with Yahoo! lately.