Amazon Will Probably Dominate Books-by-Subscription, Too

For a bunch of rapacious capitalists, the people who start technology companies are strikingly ambivalent about the concept of owning stuff. Silicon Valley would like to replace the practice of owning copies of, say, a song or a movie, with a world where everything's kept on servers that people pay to access. Next up: books.

As startups have started offering services inevitably referred to as literary Netflixes (NFLX) or Spotifys, the idea has been gaining momentum. Still, it's getting a mixed reaction at Digital Book World, a publishing industry conference about e-reading.