Ars Test Drives the "Netflix For Books"

Ars Technica reviewer Casey Johnston gives a mildly positive review to the Oyster book-rental app (and associated site), which intentionally tries to be for books what Netflix has become for movies: a low-price, subscription-based, data-sifting source of first resort. For $10 a month, users can read any of the books in Oyster's catalog (in the range of 100,000, and growing), and their reading habits are used to suggest new books of interest (with some bum steers, it seems, at present). It's iOS-only for now, with an Android version expected soon. I've only grudgingly moved more and more of my reading to tablets, but now am glad I have; still, I don't like the idea of having my books disappear if I don't pay a continuing subscription.

Re:Looks familiar

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's like a library, but we charge money for it.

There aren't any free libraries - even if you're not paying for them in any way, somebody is.

If Oyster gets a good selection of tech books, keeps them updated, and has a linux viewer, then I'd sign up for $10/mo, sure, especially if I can get some childrens' books too. I own several hundred pounds of 10+-year-old tech books and nobody "can ever take them away from me". Great ... somebody please come take them away from me.

Actually sounds attractive, but...

[YutakaFrog]

I actually think I would enjoy something like this, as I'm really enjoying using Kindle on Android lately. But not to the tune of $10 / month. The thing is for the $15 / mo you pay for Netflix, you could buy one movie. You watch one movie during that month that you otherwise would have bought, and you break even. It takes you one evening, and you still have 29 more days in the month to get more than your money's worth out of it. For the $10 they want per month for this service, you can buy one paperback book. But I know very few people who read more than one book per month right now. Maybe that's just because me and a lot of the people I know are all obsessed with the huge fantasty epics for now... (*cough*BrandonSanderson*cough) But personally, I really don't think I'd sign up for more than $2 or $3 per month. Good luck to them though.

Re:Looks familiar

[Mr. Slippery]

but even their interlibrary loan is really weak (I used to ask things like, "can you get me a book on sword metallurgy?" / "no", and eventually gave up)

That's not really how ILL works. You have to request a specific title. (Try Worldcat [worldcat.org] to find one.) My local library was able to get me anything I asked for that was in a library collection in the U.S. -- I was doing some historical research and asked for some pretty oddball texts.

If you go in with a title and the librarians won't look it up to see if it's available for ILL, they're not doing their job: send a note to your county or city library director and your councilperson.

That said, yes, if I think I might look at a book twice, I'll often just purchase a used copy from Powell's. (Certainly not from the the evil twits at Amazon.)