Oyster is Netflix for books

Oyster is offering a subscription model to enable customers to read as many titles as they want for a flat monthly fee.

E-readers and digital books have become commonplace in today’s publishing industry, but companies are still trying to work the best model for monetizing them. We’ve already seen Israel’s Total BooX charge readers by the page, and now Oyster is using a Netflix-style subscription model to enable customers to read as many titles as they want for a flat monthly fee.

With a range of 100,000 titles including bestseller fiction, non-fiction, biographies, and business textbooks, the free app is available for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch and a subscription fee of USD 9.95 a month. Much like Netflix, Oyster regularly updates its library and sorts popular titles into themed sections, such as New Releases, Popular on Oyster and True Crime, for example. It also keeps user histories, enabling it to recommend books based on previous reads and social activity. Users can choose from five typographic themes, each of which includes a discreet timeline that shows how far through the current chapter the reader is, as well as how long it should take them to finish.

One of the things that sets Oyster apart from its competitors is the attention to detail in its user interface, combined with a pricepoint that consumers are now used to for subscription entertainment services. Could Oyster become as big as companies such as Netflix and Spotify?

Spotted by Murray Orange, written by Springwise