Not to be a Debbie Downer but two publishing start-ups recently announced that they are closing down operations. Oyster, a e-book subscription service (hailed as a “Netflix for books”), has announced that it will “sunset” its existing service over the next several months. Despite initially raising over $14 million in January 2014, according to one source, it seems readers aren’t interested in paying paying only $9.95 a month to access over a million titles. It begs the question: why? And is it really all because of Amazon? (Not to mention that most of the Oyster employees will be moving to Amazon’s Play division).
There’s something about the reading experience that is both introspective yet community-based. When I was telling my friends that are not in the publishing industry about Oyster’s imminent end, most of them responded: “What is Oyster?”
Perhaps it’s a lesson in branding or the age-old problem of discoverability in a digital-first world. And there is something comforting about the analog real-life hyper-local aspect of reading, or should I say more simply, going to your library and borrowing the latest, which seems more satisfying nowadays.
Another publishing start-up, PubSlush, announced in late August that they would cease operations. This is a shame, since I know some of the good people and PubSlush and think that “a Kickstarter for books” as the VP once described it, was a great idea. A recent acquisition deal between PubSlush and Colborne Communications (based in Canada) was tabled. Instead, new company PubLaunch, touted as a “web-based company that connects trusted industry professionals with writers while providing the crowdfunding services they need to get their projects published,” will launch in February 2016. You can read more about the developments here.
Yes, they are called start-ups for a reason and maybe some of it can be boiled down to simple economics: first to market dominates, and there’s simply too much competition. There’s one thing I know for sure though, more and more people are getting their content not just in print but also in digital, on their phones/ mobiles, on tablets and this fragmentation will continue to engender more opportunities in publishing.
