@Oyster 's Online e-book Store - How exclusive New Releases and Pre-orders for Books puts @amazonbooks in the Oyster Farm

“In music or film you might want 10,000 songs or films, but I don't think you want 10,000 books”

Hachette CEO Arnaud Nourry commenting on the trend towards all-you-can-read offering by Amazon and Oyster

Well that didn't take long.

Oyster, the first Netflix of books, has rallied back against its main foe Amazon by launching their own online e-book Store as reported in the article “Oyster, the Netflix of e-books, launching online store to take on Amazon”, published April 8, 2015 5:00 by Nick Statt, CNET News and “Oyster Expands Its “Netflix For Books” Service With A New E-Book Store”, published Apr 8, 2015 by Anthony Ha, Techcrunch.

Apparently Oyster has decided that the huge book market, the majority of which Amazon owns in the USA and globally, is worth going after.

So they've decided to go into the sale of new releases and pre-orders for famous and up and coming authors that are not a part of their contract with the Big Publishers as explained in the article “The 'Netflix of Books' Just invaded Amazon's turf”, published 04.08.15 by DAVEY ALBA, Wired.

This world of books includes books in a variety of formats:

1.      Paperbacks

2.      Hardcovers

3.      e-books

4.      Audio Books

There are currently five (5) major publishers in the US of A as follows:

1.      Hachette

2.      HarperCollins

3.      Macmillan

4.      Simon & Schuster

5.      Penguin Random House

Both Amazon and Oyster have books from at least three (3) of the Big Five and competition for new titles is tight. Since September 2013, Oyster has mainly been an Apple iPhone App as noted in my blog article entitled “Oyster launchers US$9.95 Apple iPhone App for lending 100,000 book titles - Amazon Kindle Lending just got competition”. More recently they've put out a Google Android App that gives you unlimited access to book for US$9.95 per month.

They've also had to contend with Amazon copying them by launch a similar service in July 2014 for US$9.99 called Kindle Unlimited on their Amazon Kindle platform where you can read-all-you-can as noted in my blog article entitled “Amazon launches US$9.99 Kindle Unlimited - Oyster and Scribd got served by Earth’s Most Customer Centric Company but pay Indies Publishers better”.

So why is Oyster going into selling books when you can get some books for free? Like Music, it's all about exclusive content partnerships.

Oyster’s Online e-book Store - How exclusive New Releases and Pre-orders for Books puts Amazon in the Oyster Farm

The idea of an all-you-can-eat model for Books hasn't caught on, as most people only read two (2) or so books at a time.

That models works with on-demand Video and Music i.e. streaming, which is becoming very profitable for the Music Industry, based on stats from the RIAA for 2014 as noted in my blog article entitled “@RIAA says Streaming beating CD Sales - Why HD Audio Physical Digital Music comeback progresses as Piracy is the Problem”.

In fact, there is a demand for HD Audio Music and Videos.

So much so that Jay Z and his Musical Artiste friend have pioneered a US$19.99 per month service based on this type of Streaming content with playlists curated by the same Music Artiste called Tidal HiFi as explained in my blog article entitled “Jay Z's US$19.99 Tidal HiFi launched with Artiste Backing - How HD Audio Quality Music selected by Artiste will turn the Tide”.

There is no equivalent demand for books or e-books, albeit e-readers like the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 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” do make reading convenient, possibly spurring a return to reading books as the CNET Video below suggests.

Also Oyster is an app that is restricted to Smartphone and Tablets and must compete for the user's attention along with every other form of content. So it’ll be interesting to see how this will work out as Oyster prepares for the Catch of the Day.