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‘Netflix for Books’ Startup Oyster Is Shutting Down

Oyster, the so-called “Netflix for books,” is shutting down.

The two-year-old company says it will take steps to “sunset” the Oyster service over the next few months and will honor customers’ requests for refunds over the next few weeks. It’s not immediately clear exactly why the company is shuttering its operations, but as Re/code initially reported, most of its team, including CEO Eric Stromberg and co-founders Andrew Brown and Willem Van Lancker, are joining Google to work on the company’s Google Play bookstore. (Google confirmed the move in an email to WIRED.)

“We believe more than ever that the phone will be the primary reading device globally over the next decade—enabling access to knowledge and stories for billions of people worldwide,” the co-founders wrote in a blog post. “Looking forward, we feel this is best seized by taking on new opportunities to fully realize our vision for ebooks.”

The news comes as a bit of a surprise—Oyster was one of the major players in the e-book subscription space along with San Francisco startup Scribd and Amazon, which offers all-you-can eat reading through Kindle Unlimited. Unlike Amazon, however, Oyster had the backing of the Big Five publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster—who offered their books on the service. (The Big Five also work with Scribd.) The e-book subscription business model is based on paying publishers a sum of money after “a fair portion” of a book is read, as well as sharing anonymized reading activity with publishers to help them target readers.

All of which sounds sensible. But we still don’t know how it works in practice. Neither Oyster nor Scribd has published data on readership. In a leaked letter last July, Scribd revealed it was planning to pull thousands of romance titles because rabid fans of the genre just read too much. The implication was that model operated much like a gym membership: after locking in your commitment to a flat monthly fee, the services save money if you used them less.

Meanwhile, there’s a good chance Amazon Kindle Unlimited, which sits comfortably within its larger parent company, isn’t in any danger. That may be why most of Oyster’s team is moving to Google. It’s unclear whether Google is planning to launch an e-book subscription to compete with Amazon, but the hiring of most of Oyster’s team should at least give the tech giant a boost if they ever want to pursue that venture.

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