Oyster is shutting down

I have never heard of this product until it became discontinued - which sucks.

To me the statement reads like an adult explaining the horrors of war to a 5 year old who glorified war without knowing the reality. Was it really necessary to wrap a simple notice of closure/costumer apology up in such an overly tame and submissive manner?

Why not something concise:

"We sincerely apologize to our loyal customers, and potential future customers that within x amount of time product y will be discontinued for various reasons, which we are currently not at liberty of discussing in a public forum. Thank you very much for your patronage and support. Foremost we are ensuring that our existing customers receive the most professional and respectful treatment.

Sincerely - company z team."

Less bullshit, more realshit.

> It depends on the phone.

I think it depends on the person more than the phone. I've used many different smartphones and tablets, not one of them is comfortable for reading a book-length text on. I know there are people who disagree. But everyone who doesn't disagree isn't a customer for Oyster.

Fair point. Was going by the numbers of 3M USD seed round in 2012, and 17M in 2014. Without much major press and valuations being made public, it's kind of safe to assume that the 3M USD was burning out by the end of 2013. 14M from 2013 to 2015 would be 7M per year. Assuming rising costs from both running the business, 5M and 9M across two years seems plausible.

Given the number of employees in the company (26), 3 co founders, who form half of a 6 C-level team, it's likely that the team size increased along that curve as well (3M, 5M, 9M). This is entirely speculation at this point.

But after some further reading, it's possible that their business model may have just been not profitable. For each reader who read more than 10% of a book, the full retail price of the book is paid out to publishers. For people reading 3-4 books a month, they would be making a loss from those customers.

If you aren't the sort that reads 3-4 books a month, then you are also probably not the kind of person who spends a 10 USD subscription service to an 'all-you-can-read' ebook service. Therefore the larger base of customers there were probably loss makers. So assuming a growing customer base made up of loss makers it's entirely likely that they burnt out funds. Now that the running costs of a business in general were clarified in a reply above it actually makes sense that the money could have run out.

I'm lucky to live in a county with a good library system that supports this model, but what about the rest of the country? Are they all served as well as me?

$10/mo doesn't seem too outrageous if you have no other alternatives. If you are a heavy reader then this makes sense vs. buying from Amazon or another retailer.

I suppose it comes down to strength of library - for $10/mo, can you match other book seller's content? I took a look for a few books I've been reading recently - it seems about a 50% match. Personally, not for me.

I pay for Kindle Unlimited and can say first-hand that it has a terrible selection of mostly self-published and second rate books. Kindle itself of course has the best selection, but that's on a pay-per-book model.

The brilliant thing about Oyster was that they have so much first rate material in their "unlimited" model. There are plenty of arguments to be made about how many books you can read a month etc., but those arguments miss the point. Oyster opened a whole new browsing mindset where you could see a book cover, open it immediately and essentially flip through the book reading bits here and there and re-visit it later if it piqued your interest enough. It's unlike the library where, even in digital libraries, there are queues and "holds" and checkout limits. It's unlike Kindle where you have to commit by actually buying every book which becomes prohibitively expensive if you're just browsing, or Kindle Unlimited where the selection is, as I previously mentioned, dismal. It's hard to imagine until you've used it, but having been an Oyster subscriber for a couple years, I can say it's a shift in the way I think about books.