Oyster Shuts Down; Perseus for Sale

摘要

Oyster, the $9.95 all-you-can-read monthly ebook subscription service that came on the scene in 2013, quietly announced on its blog that it "will be taking steps to sunset the existing Oyster service over the next several months," according to tech news site Re/Code September 21. A competitor to the previously launched Scribd ($8.99/mo.) and to Amazon Kindle Unlimited ($9.99; mostly self-published authors), Oyster had deals for ebooks with several Big Five publishers but was the smallest of these three services and never gained the same traction. In their blog post, the Oyster leaders, CEO Eric Stromberg and cofounders Andrew Brown and Willem Van Lancker, stated, "We believe more than ever that the phone will be the primary reading device globally over the next decade.... Looking forward, we feel this is best seized by taking on new opportunities to fully realize our vision for ebooks." The "new opportunities" they refer to, as Re/Code also reported, include the departure of Stromberg, Brown, and Van Lancker to Google Play Books, an online bookstore. Gary Price on LJ's infoDOCKET (ow.ly/SNRDe) posited that "Google [could] launch/rebrand Oyster to compete with Scribd and Amazon's Kindle Unlimited in the ebook subscription space."