Love
visiting the library to borrow books for a good overnight read? Got an Apple
iPhone? Then Oyster Books has launched an Apple iPhone App that allows people
to borrow and read as many book as you can in a thirty (30) day period for only
US$9.95 as declared in the article “Binge
on books with Oyster”, published September 6, 2013 2:55 PM
PDT by Tuong Nguyen, CNET
News.
Oyster
Books is named after a famous line in the Shakespearean Play “The Merry Wives
of Windsor” in which a lead character speaks the words “the world's mine
oyster”. Their inception in December 2012 was the brainchild of a team made up
of a former Google Engineer and Apple Engineer who both apparently had a
penchant for books.
Oyster
Books has managed to wrangle deals with major publishers to lend their books to
their subscriber for this cut-rate monthly fee. Currently their reading app is
available only in Apple iTunes Store,
but the Apple iPad will be added to that platform by December 2013, with
Android sure to follow.
Please
note this is borrowing, not downloading of books as described in my blog article
entitled “US$199
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite upgrades Hardware and Software - How to find free
Ebooks and e-Book Readers for Laptops and PC”.
Also,
for now it’s only on the Apple iPhone; clearly the Engineer’s an Apple fanboy
or Apple iTunes Store’s a lot more
profitable, as the Google Play Store
is not exactly made up of users who like to even spend on buying books when so
many free book Apps are available.
Take
note of the fact that an equivalent lending service, Amazon’s Kindle Lending
Library that’s availed to Amazon Prime users who pony up US$79.99 per year,
only allows you to borrow one book per month. The publishers and their stable
of Authors they’ve managed to get onto the Oyster Farm are as follows:
1. HarperCollins
2. Houghton
Mifflin Harcour
3. Workman
4. Smashworld,
5. HarperCollins
Thus
jumping on the Oyster bandwagon is inevitable, as more big publishers are being
negotiated and more books are coming, if your eyes can stand the eyestrain from
the Apple iPhone. I suspect their negotiations with these Nook Publishers are
based on increasing readership in a kind of Taste-and-buy model like Spotify or
even Netflix.
By
allowing Lending via Oyster Books, it translates to more book sales via other
portals for the Book Publishers, such as Kindle. For US$9.95, you can buy some
lower end e-books on Amazon as opposed to using your Credit Card and buy
the book in Paperback or hardcover
format!
Publishers,
it seems, are getting hip to the reality: low-cost e-readers and cheaper
e-books are the way to go to stave off e-book piracy as stated in my Geezam blog
article “Piracy and E-Books in a
Tale of Two Cities”.
With
a pricing and business model that mimics Netflix or even Spotify as suggested
in the article “Netflix
for books? Oyster launches with over 100,000 in-print titles”,
published September 6, 2013 By Mike Flacy, DigitalTrends,
Oyster with their nearly 100,000 titles is yet another option to Torrenting
books or downloading them from Free Resources if you’re a fan of the Apple iPhone and the Apple iPad.
Happy
Reading!
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