Amazon quietly floats e-book subscription service for Kindle

Amazon is trying out a new e-book subscription service for its Kindle users, reports Laura Hazard Owen at GigaOm.

According to cached pages that have since been taken offline, the service would allow Kindle users unlimited access to more than a half a million e-books for a single price of $9.99 per month. The e-book subscription service would be called Kindle Unlimited, or KU.

Existing e-book subscription services, including Oyster and Scribd, are independent publishing innovators trying to create a “Netflix for e-books” market. If Amazon follows through on its testing and launches its version, it will be the biggest player in the field, by far.

Rather than announcing its service with a splashy debut, Amazon’s test pages surfaced in Kindle user boards. Some authors noted they could see their books in the KU listings; one wrote that he saw a new KU column appear in his sales reports.

There is as of this writing no confirmation if or when KU will launch, or which publishers might be participating. Amazon has not responded to our request for comment.

More book news; I’m @paperhaus on Twitter