Google hires Oyster execs as ebook service announces shutdown

Many customers subscribe to video subscription services; however, many people are still not willing to subscribe for similar e-book services.

Oyster is not alone at the top of the e-book subscriptions business. Most recently they did this with Homejoy, a startup for professional home services, and relaunched it under the Google name after hiring 20 Homejoy employees.

We can still seek out books, magazines, and newspapers, but these days, many of us have the internet in our pockets.

The start-up offered no specific reason as to why it was closing its doors, but did say its vision for digital books would be “best seized by taking on new opportunities”. According to Re/code, however, some of the Oyster team is heading to Google where they’ll work on the Google Play Books team. By itself, Oyster wasn’t able to bring “every book in the world” into its system. Scribd, more popular for hosting papers than books, would follow suit with subscription based ebook and comic rentals.

The bulk of the ebooks on Kindle Unlimited are by self-published authors who have agreed to make those ebooks exclusive to Amazon for the period that they’re included in the program.

If those words smack of optimism, it’s because cofounders Eric Stromberg, Andrew Brown, and Willem Van Lancker have already taken their talents elsewhere.

In April this year, Oyster also announced that the company is expanding and it has raised additional capital.

Google is not calling this a full blown takeover of the company but it seems it will be paying something to the Oyster investors who have a $17 Million investment into the company. The existing Oyster service will be sunset in early 2016. It introduced a new feature called Lumin, which makes reading on mobile devices easier. Though the sector is not at all crowded, the firm competes with the likes of Scribd and Amazon.