Oyster

» see oysterbooks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

oyster launched on 6 september 2013 out of new york. the pitch was clean: ten dollars a month for unlimited access to a growing catalog of ebooks. the three founders (eric stromberg, andrew brown, willem van lancker) had raised from founders fund and peter thiel before there was any product to show. they built it as an iOS-first app that treated reading like a subscription rather than a purchase.

the catalog grew fast. by mid-2015 they had over a million titles from more than 1,600 publisher partners. HarperCollins came in early. Simon and Schuster followed. Macmillan held out. penguin random house never signed. the two big holdouts were most of what people actually wanted to read, and that was the whole problem.

oyster was a US product with US publisher deals and a US billing address. i was on a kindle by then, buying single titles from amazon.com.tr when i wanted an english book and living with the fact that half of what i wanted was not licensed for turkey anyway. subscription ebook services in that window did not cross the ocean in any usable way.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it launched ~

the app itself was well-made. the reader engine was smooth, the recommendation surface was better than kindle's, the reading-stats page did the little quantified-self thing that people liked in 2014. the reviews were good. the press was good. the download numbers looked promising.

then in july 2014 amazon launched kindle unlimited at $9.99 a month with a catalog that was mostly self-published titles plus a rotating loan pool. the pricing was identical. the catalog was worse. but it was amazon, sitting inside the kindle ecosystem that already owned most english-language ebook readers. every conversation about oyster after that started with "why not just use kindle unlimited".

~ what really happened ~

on 21 september 2015 the founders posted a note saying the service would sunset over the coming months. google had acquihired the team into the play books division in new york. recode called it an "acqhire" and noted it was unclear whether google was actually buying the corporate entity or just paying investors for the right to hire the people.

the sunset played out through late december 2015 as accounts hit their renewal dates and got closed one at a time. the ios app got a final update in mid-january 2016 that removed the reader and left a farewell screen. that was the end. the play books team never shipped an oyster-derived product.

~ what replaced it ~

scribd survived as the last general-catalog ebook subscription that mattered, though it kept changing what "unlimited" meant. kindle unlimited kept growing and stayed mostly a self-published catalog. the netflix-for-ebooks model as originally imagined never happened. the publishers were right to hold out and wrong about what to do next, which is a common combination.

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