E-e-book App Oyster Is Closing retailer As Google Hires Its Cofounders

Oyster, the e-book subscription provider and would-be Amazon competitor, is asking it quits. In a weblog post printed Monday, the Oyster crew announced that, in the coming months, it would be “taking steps to sundown the prevailing Oyster carrier.”

Modeled after Netflix and Spotify, Oyster gave its customers unlimited get entry to to a catalog of more than 1 million e-books for simply $10 a month. Early this year, Oyster brought the complete Harry Potter series to its library, along with numerous titles from Macmillan, which joined two of its fellow “big 5” publishers, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, on the platform. In April, Oyster tried to expand past its subscription provider and compete with the likes of Amazon, by way of introducing the choice to purchase more recent e-books that publishers wouldn’t make available to subscribers.

whereas its formatting used to be easy and straightforward on the eyes—far more so than the Kindle app, in reality—Oyster confronted an uphill battle because it tried to tackle Amazon’s huge choice and readership. however the firm’s blog submit makes clear that while this is the top of the highway for Oyster in its existing type, its founding team feels strongly about the way forward for e-books:

As we continue on, we couldn’t be more interested by the way forward for ebooks and cellular studying. We consider more than ever that the phone will be the major studying device globally over the next decade—enabling get entry to to data and stories for billions of individuals international. looking ahead, we really feel that is highest seized by way of taking over new opportunities to completely notice our vision for ebooks.

If those words smack of optimism, it is because cofounders Eric Stromberg, Andrew Brown, and Willem Van Lancker have already taken their abilities in different places. consistent with Re/code, the Oyster professionals and a couple of different workers are joining Google’s e-guide division—a move that would hint at a forthcoming e-e-book subscription service from Google. In what sounds suspiciously like an acqui-hire, Google will supposedly pay investors who backed Oyster in alternate for hiring a part of the company’s workforce, Re/code stories.

[via Re/code]