I love to read. When I was a child I loved going to the library and even today, I love taking my own children there. To me, those visits instill that love of reading that is so important. As you can imagine, I also have a close relationship with my Kindle and don’t particularly like leaving home without it. So you can imagine my concern when an article in Forbes suggested it was going to soon be Amazon vs Libraries.
Could I even make such a choice?
Amazon’s new service, known as Kindle Unlimited, is a subscription service that gives readers “unlimited” access to 600,000 titles. This surpasses many library’s collections. And, at $9.99 per month, it could be argued that individuals could absorb these costs to save countries the financial burden (in the UK, £1 billion a year or $1.7 billion in the U.S. goes to supporting the library system).
But if this were to happen, where would we gather as a community to read? Where would we go to peruse shelves of books? Already, most individual book stores are closing.
Don’t get me wrong…I want to give Amazon a big hug for helping indie authors get on the map. But as the saying goes, “Can’t we all get along?”
If you would like to read the complete article in Forbes, here is the link:
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