Oyster: The Dawn of Enlightenment 2.0?

I have been following the progression of the internet’s soon to be newest obsession, OysterBooks.com, for quite some time now. In the vein of Netflix, Spotify and Audible, Oyster is a site/app that allows users to access thousands of ebooks through a monthly subscription based service that right now costs only $9.95. Not bad, right? For the cost of about one ebook, you can access a nearly unlimited supply of reading material that the site boasts includes over 200,000 titles and growing. To be quite honest, I have been wondering how a site like Oyster would fare in our modern digital age. How would a subscription service for full length written works manage in an internet age culture where we communicate through pictures and video, skim news headlines and have a collective attention span of five seconds? We’ve replaced solid magazine articles with short blog posts, and instruction manuals with a Pinterest board. I definitely knew Oyster was something that would come around eventually, we have subscription services for everything from games to movies to TV shows to music, not to mention the hundreds of subscription boxes for toys, clothing, food and grooming supplies, so why not books? But how many of us actually read books anymore, or at least enough to make a subscription worth the money? Initially, I think many people are going to think like I did that paying the price of a book per month is a little silly when we have library’s where you can borrow all these books and more for free, and that’s essentially what you are doing with the app, renting books. Of course, these are ebooks so its much more convenient for you to download a new book than to drive to the library to pick one up physically, and even libraries with ebook selections available online still have a significant barrier to entry and in most library systems only have a few “copies” of ebooks available for lending. This does not seem to be the case with Oyster. All you need is a credit card and an iOS device which gives Oyster a reasonably low barrier to entry. I get it, not everyone has an Apple product, but think about the number of iPods, iPhones and iPads out there in the world. That’s a potentially huge market to sample from, and if anyone were going to pay $10 a month for a book, it would be an iOS user who has been conditioned over the last 7+ years to pay for their content.

So, will Oyster do for books what Netflix did for movies and TV? Will Oyster bring the good news of the written word to our attention deficit population? I think the two platforms are actually incredibly similar when you think about where Netflix was 5 years ago in comparison to where Oyster is right now. Both were flying under the radar, both had a good selection of content although void of new releases or epic blockbusters and both had a reasonable price point. Of course, we all know what happened to Netflix, even I wrote about it, but in the end Netflix made it out of all their troubles and still dominates the at home streaming market, albeit with significantly more competition. I think we could see a pretty similar situation for Oyster in the next few months and early years until the brand Oyster becomes more of a household name.

So the big question is, will you be signing up for Oyster? To help answer this question I have created something of a litmus test to decide if an Oyster subscription would work for you.

1. Do you read or begin to read at least one book a month at your leisure? 

This is important because if you are not currently a reader, signing up for a subscription service for ebooks certainly isn’t going to turn you into one.

2. Browsing the main pages of the Oyster site, can you find 3 books you would be interested in reading?

Although Oyster boasts 200,000 books and counting, they promote their most popular works on their main pages. If you don’t see things you want to read while skimming their site, you probably won’t find much else better once you have full access to their collection.

3. Are you the type of person who would cancel your subscription if you were not getting use out of it?

Oyster, like Netflix and other subscription services offers a one month free trial, but you still need to sign up with a credit card, which means if you are not pleased you need to cancel before your card is charged.

If you said NO to any of those three questions above, this subscription is probably not for you, unless you also said YES to question three. I’m all for giving things a try and taking a look around, especially when their is a free trial associated with it, so if you know you will stay on top of your trial and cancel before you begin getting charged, by all means, give the app a whirl if you’re curious! If you happen to be an avid reader, or at least someone who likes to pick up a new title or two every month, perhaps Oyster would be a good way for you to save some money and get a variety of leisure time reading material, so long as you are not addicted to new releases.

Okay, moment of truth, will you be signing up for Oyster? If you have already joined, let us know what you think about the service in the comments below. I would love to hear more from those who have joined and understand more of that experience!