Megan Garber welcomes the latest newcomer to the streaming trend – audiobooks:
What Netflix's Watch Instantly has done for movies, and what Spotify has done for music, Audiobooks could do for books. The service has the potential to reframe book-buying as a transactional thing, making it less about purchasing an object, and more about purchasing an experience.
In fact — convergence! — the monthly unlimited access Audiobooks.com is experimenting with has less in common with, say, Amazon's approach and more in common with cable TV's: In a monthly subscription framework, the unit of purchase is the bundle, and vice versa. The price is constant — and, more importantly, unaffected by the content that's consumed. Whether you watch 20 hours of Parks and Rec each month or 20 minutes of it, you'll pay the same thing. Because you're paying, officially, not for content itself, but for the potential to consume it.
The Dish 