And I don’t see how a company’s current revenue means it can’t be killed dead in a few years time by technological advances - I’m not saying it will but without changing it might well be.

Ooh - I just did the calcs for the stats above, with Wikipedia-sourced population sizes, and it looks like the UK and the US have about the same per-capita penetration - about 16%.

Interestingly, but probably not entirely relatedly, that’s almost exactly Amazon’s share of the UK book market.

But anyway, since we both agree on the original point - Bookswim looks awful and will probably die, let’s move on…

2. Amazon Unbox is a retail service, not a subscription service. It’s more likely to cannibalise Amazon’s own DVD sales than compete with Netflix. You can rent some titles on Unbox, but you pay per title, like at Blockbuster. For the price of buying one movie on Unbox, you can get a month’s rental on Netflix — up to 60 DVDs if you’re really energetic.

3. Amazon Unbox has about 4,000 titles. Netflix has 75,000. (Amazon Still Boxed has quite a few, too).

4. Netflix did about $1 billion of sales in 2006, nearly 50% up on the year before, which is growth way ahead of the internet retailer average. For a dying model, that’s not bad. How long do you think it will take Amazon Unboxed to get to that? (Hint: iTunes is nowhere near $1b/year yet.)

As for Amazon setting up at no cost to themselves — of course that’s not true. The costs were basically the same as anyone else would face (rental stock, admin staff, software), although presumably lower due to economies of scale, extant platform, incumbent brand and so on. But the DVDs and warehouse space didn’t cost them nothing — they’d already paid for them, and they were assets lost to their existing businesses. By the same logic you could say it would cost Amazon ‘nothing’ to give me all their books. (Anyway, are you sure they were the same stock? Rental DVDs are usually physically different, and differently priced; hence the warning on many retail DVDs that they’re not for hire).

Finally: streaming has been coming for years, and I think it’ll take several more to do so much damage DVDs. Getting online content onto a television is still a geek thing: nobody uses Windows Media Center, and Apple TV may be a good move (Apple is the obvious long-term threat here at the moment, to Amazon as well as others), but it’s a first one. (And it’s not streaming.)

But yes, Bookswim seems unlikely to get anywhere (and with a website design like that deserves no better). For a start, any idea what pricing will look like? It takes 2 hours to watch a DVD, which is why Netflix’s subscription is attractive; you can at least in theory get through loads in a month, so it sounds like good value. It takes most people (with jobs/lives) much more time to read a book. And the physical experience of watching a DVD several other people have used is the same, as long as it’s not damaged. Not true for books.