quote:

Today, Amazon unveiled something radical: the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. You get to download one Kindle book a month, with no due dates, free, if you’re an Amazon Prime member and a Kindle owner.

O.K., whoa.

First of all, Amazon Prime used to be a free-shipping service. You pay $80 a year, and you get two-day free shipping on anything you buy from Amazon. It was fine, I guess, for people who bought enough stuff from Amazon to make it worth the fee.

But then something really weird happened. Amazon decided to compete with Netflix’s movie-streaming service. It started licensing more and more movies and TV shows — now 13,000 of them, which is rapidly approaching Netflix’s library size. The price? Free, if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber.

What does free shipping have to do with streaming movies? Beats me. But it must have been a delightful surprise to people who’d signed up for Prime.