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Speaking as someone who is not familiar with Oyster… The journalist (Davey Alba) has left out some critical context to drive home the significance of Oyster’s

by jasode 12y ago

Speaking as someone who is not familiar with Oyster… The journalist (Davey Alba) has left out some critical context to drive home the significance of Oyster’s foray into "ebook retail". After doing some research, here’s the part that the Wired article doesn’t make explicit: Yes, the Oyster subscription service is has titles from "all 5 big publishers" and yes, it is "unlimited" but the catch is that the content is mostly the publishers’ back catalogs. In other words, a brand new book release would not have been available on the $9.95 subscription service on the first day. This is similar to Amazon Prime Instant Video where the old seasons of TV shows are free but the latest/last/current season costs $$$. Spotify for music also works like that for some artists; Adele has her old songs available in the subscription but her brand new song might only be available from iTunes for $1.29. It looks like a common industry pattern of segmentation whether it's books, videos, or songs: the old stuff can be packaged into cheap subscriptions but the new stuff will command a separate premium. With Oyster adding the ebook retail component, members can get access to the very latest books without waiting months (or years) for the title to show up as a subscription option. The members simply buy the ebook as a separate additional charge from the $9.95 subscription. Since Jeff Bezos’ seems to have a very antagonistic relationship with the book publishers, it gives Oyster a chance for significant ebook sales. What’s odd is that Jeff Bezos studied Walmart and he surely knows that the brick&morter stores share analytics sales data with their vendors. That way, the vendors can maximize efficiency of their supply chains and in turn, offer lower prices to Walmart. The article implies that amazon.com does not share analytics with the publishers (unlike Oyster) . I don’t know why Bezos would be so guarded about it since it can help publishers fine tune their offerings which in turn should help Jeff sell more ebooks and Kindle devices. Maybe he thinks he needs that proprietary data as a comparative advantage for his own publishing house[1]. However, it seems unrealistic to think many major authors would jump to Amazon Publishing because amazon has better analytics. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Publishing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Publishing

mreiland 12y ago
My hope is that it will somehow allow me to stop dealing with the walled garden aspect of ebooks.
oskarth 12y ago
> It looks like a common industry pattern of segmentation whether it's books, video, or songs: the old stuff can be packaged into cheap subscriptions but the new stuff will command a separate premium. It's a good thing that most books worth reading are "old". Time is a signal, so I would consider this a feature.
TheBeardKing 12y ago
Thanks for the added info, I also wasn't familiar with Oyster. It also appears that Oyster offers the app for iOS and Android, but that still leaves a hole for e-paper readers. I'll likely be buying a Kindle Paperwhite in the near future, as the contrast, weight, and battery life just can't be beat. I do wish there was a competitive e-reader open to other subscriptions/retail stores such as Oyster. Why is there no open e-reader OS yet? Is the market demand for e-readers over tablets not there?
mklim 12y ago
Adding to this, from going through their website, it's not as simple as "old" books are free and "new" books are a premium. I did a cursory look through their catalog and it looks like any book that is still selling well and under copyright has a price on top of the subscription fee. The DaVinci Code came out 12 years ago and is still $10 on top of a subscription, Storm Front (15 years old) is still $10 as well, A Game of Thrones (19 years old now) is $10 on top of a subscription fee, etc. Ten, twenty years is a relatively short period of time for a book to have existed, granted, but it's still a lot longer than the one year wait you'd get from Netflix.
- smackfu 12y ago
  That's bizarre, since those prices are basically the same as buying them retail.
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    Yes, I don't like that. They should at least be say 20 percent cheaper.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- guelo 12y ago
  No, it's pretty much like Netflix. Hollywood only lets Netflix have the stuff nobody is interested in. They do not have anything from a year ago.
cwyers 12y ago
It seems like the analytics the article talks about are from the unlimited service Oyster operates, and the analytics being offered is contrasted to services like Netflix. I think Amazon still probably offers the publishers information about retail sales.
- jasode 12y ago
  I'm not an expert on the Kindle device (and the Kindle app for Android and iOS) but I understood that amazon has fine-grained "page reading behavior" data from the Kindle ecosystem. Data like what pages readers bookmark, the relative position of where readers "give up" on finishing a book, etc. I'm guessing this is the data that amazon is not sharing with the publishers.
tomjen3 12y ago
That seems to me to ruin any point of Oyster. 10 usd/month is already redicously expensive given that most books are less than that as a kindle book and that most readers doesn't read a book a month (most people don't read a book at all after HS, but they aren't the target market). To then charge full retail price on top of that for books one would actually want. What are they thinking?
- ghaff 12y ago
  I can't find the reference, but a few years ago, I remember Tim O'Reilly making some point around book pricing to the effect that time was ultimately the limiting factor for book consumption. In other words, you can drop the price to zero and most people will still consume a relatively limited number of books. (Of course, O'Reilly has a subscription service themselves but that's arguably a bit different because most of the books in Safari are the sort of things that many people will dip into rather than read cover-to-cover.) $10/month does seem high for most people. That's at least 10 Kindle or used book purchases--including bestsellers. That's about what I read (excluding books that I want in physical form).
  - cwyers 12y ago
    > (Of course, O'Reilly has a subscription service themselves but that's arguably a bit different because most of the books in Safari are the sort of things that many people will dip into rather than read cover-to-cover.) And you can talk employers into buying a site license for Safari, rather than having to get all your business directly from consumers.
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    I think he is right about that for books you want to read through. It would certainly be worth paying more for a cross library subscription that would allow you to quickly look up things in a lot of different books - but that only works for non-fiction.

by jasode 12y ago

mreiland 12y ago

My hope is that it will somehow allow me to stop dealing with the walled garden aspect of ebooks.

oskarth 12y ago

> It looks like a common industry pattern of segmentation whether it's books, video, or songs: the old stuff can be packaged into cheap subscriptions but the new stuff will command a separate premium. It's a good thing that most books worth reading are "old". Time is a signal, so I would consider this a feature.

TheBeardKing 12y ago

Thanks for the added info, I also wasn't familiar with Oyster. It also appears that Oyster offers the app for iOS and Android, but that still leaves a hole for e-paper readers. I'll likely be buying a Kindle Paperwhite in the near future, as the contrast, weight, and battery life just can't be beat. I do wish there was a competitive e-reader open to other subscriptions/retail stores such as Oyster. Why is there no open e-reader OS yet? Is the market demand for e-readers over tablets not there?

mklim 12y ago

Adding to this, from going through their website, it's not as simple as "old" books are free and "new" books are a premium. I did a cursory look through their catalog and it looks like any book that is still selling well and under copyright has a price on top of the subscription fee. The DaVinci Code came out 12 years ago and is still $10 on top of a subscription, Storm Front (15 years old) is still $10 as well, A Game of Thrones (19 years old now) is $10 on top of a subscription fee, etc. Ten, twenty years is a relatively short period of time for a book to have existed, granted, but it's still a lot longer than the one year wait you'd get from Netflix.

smackfu 12y ago
That's bizarre, since those prices are basically the same as buying them retail.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Yes, I don't like that. They should at least be say 20 percent cheaper.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
guelo 12y ago
No, it's pretty much like Netflix. Hollywood only lets Netflix have the stuff nobody is interested in. They do not have anything from a year ago.

cwyers 12y ago

It seems like the analytics the article talks about are from the unlimited service Oyster operates, and the analytics being offered is contrasted to services like Netflix. I think Amazon still probably offers the publishers information about retail sales.

jasode 12y ago
I'm not an expert on the Kindle device (and the Kindle app for Android and iOS) but I understood that amazon has fine-grained "page reading behavior" data from the Kindle ecosystem. Data like what pages readers bookmark, the relative position of where readers "give up" on finishing a book, etc. I'm guessing this is the data that amazon is not sharing with the publishers.

tomjen3 12y ago

That seems to me to ruin any point of Oyster. 10 usd/month is already redicously expensive given that most books are less than that as a kindle book and that most readers doesn't read a book a month (most people don't read a book at all after HS, but they aren't the target market). To then charge full retail price on top of that for books one would actually want. What are they thinking?

ghaff 12y ago
I can't find the reference, but a few years ago, I remember Tim O'Reilly making some point around book pricing to the effect that time was ultimately the limiting factor for book consumption. In other words, you can drop the price to zero and most people will still consume a relatively limited number of books. (Of course, O'Reilly has a subscription service themselves but that's arguably a bit different because most of the books in Safari are the sort of things that many people will dip into rather than read cover-to-cover.) $10/month does seem high for most people. That's at least 10 Kindle or used book purchases--including bestsellers. That's about what I read (excluding books that I want in physical form).
- cwyers 12y ago
  > (Of course, O'Reilly has a subscription service themselves but that's arguably a bit different because most of the books in Safari are the sort of things that many people will dip into rather than read cover-to-cover.) And you can talk employers into buying a site license for Safari, rather than having to get all your business directly from consumers.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  I think he is right about that for books you want to read through. It would certainly be worth paying more for a cross library subscription that would allow you to quickly look up things in a lot of different books - but that only works for non-fiction.