The fall of Oyster and Scribd: Subscriptions might become interesting again

Interesting Tweet-storm (or at least that is what I think it is called) from Fahranheit Press, a fine purveyor of Crime Fiction.

The Big 6 could have supported scalable, sustainable business models from a whole range of new entrants into the market.

— Fahrenheit Press (@fahrenheitpress) September 24, 2015

I encourage you to read the rant, as it’s a good indicator of the state of subscription services for eBooks.

Below is a good summary of what happened.

So if an eBook was priced at $12 retail Oyster would have been paying something like $7 to the publishers

— Fahrenheit Press (@fahrenheitpress) September 24, 2015

The MORE they scaled the business the MORE they lost. — Fahrenheit Press (@fahrenheitpress) September 24, 2015

No publisher is going to turn down terms like that. So when a VC-backed entity like Oyster or Scribd says “okay you win, we’ll starve ourselves,” all the oxygen leaves the room for non-terrible discussions.¹ It effectively set back any reasonable business terms on subscriptions for the past 2-years.

Now that Scribd is circling the drain and Oyster is effectively gone, things get interesting again for the rest of the players to see if we can move this industry in the right direction, with business models that benefit the entire food chain.

As for the staff of Oyster, congratulations on being “acqui-hired” by Google.  There are definitely worse fates than that.