It relies on annoyingly bad 3rd-party software (so it's not 'fun' like I imagine a Spotify for books would be) but in the US you can get ebooks and audiobooks from your local library.<p>My wife is a master at this, with library cards in three cities (where we live, where we used to live, and where she grew up). She's literally never not reading a book and she's got a deep bench of books-to-be-read all lined up.<p>Some libraries are actually going DIY: <a href="http://evoke.cvlsites.org/" rel="nofollow">http://evoke.cvlsites.org/</a>
“<i>There should be a Netflix for books.</i>”<p>“<i>THE LIBRARY</i>”<p><a href="http://www.johnnywander.com/comics/24" rel="nofollow">http://www.johnnywander.com/comics/24</a>
The audio books situation is even more obviously pathetic, at least in Audible's case. On Audible, for $15 a month you get to listen to, wait for it, ONE book! Worse than that, each additional books costs. Worse still is that prices appear to be at or near hard-back prices. And to add insult to injury, this arrangement prevents the purchasing of books on iOS devices (I guess because Amazon doesn't want to pay the 30%)!<p>Compare this to Hulu, Netflix and Spotify which offer unlimited consumption (although with incomplete libraries) for around $10 per month.
Actual physical books are still pretty good; I can't speak for other countries, but the county in the UK I live in (as is common in all UK counties, I believe) will fetch books for you from anywhere else in the county for fifty pence a pop, and if they haven't got it in county the inter-library loans turn out to be astonishingly fast and remarkably good value.<p>I have requested some quite obtuse books over the past year and they've managed them all so far; coming from the British Library in London, a university maths library in Leeds, a university library in Exeter, somewhere I couldn't even tell where it came from, and so on. If you like reading, and you don't absolutely need the convenience of the book weighing very little and being quite small (i.e. an eReader of some kind - I'm a fan of old Sony models), physical books from a national library network are still really good.
I have had Kindle Unlimited for a few months. It saves me money most months...I was reading about $20-$30 worth of books per month before, now I'm down to about $15 (Unlimited has a good selection, but there are still significant titles that aren't available via Unlimited). My local library offers ebooks, and even has a pretty good selection, but everything I ever want is always checked out and has a waiting list, so I end up buying a lot more than borrowing. It's worrying that there may be a future in which people need paid for subscriptions for a functional library (since I can foresee a day not too far away where printed books are considered relics).