It seems like the main complaints are that:
- It's iPhone only. This will, of course, change. They have to launch somewhere first.
- We already have public libraries and Overdrive. Sure, they are out there but they don't solve the problem that Oyster does. If you just want to flip through a bunch of books and see what you feel like reading, your current options are to go to a physical bookstore or library or hope Amazon or Google Books has enough to satisfy you in their limited previews. Imagine that as you're reading a book, you come across a reference another and being able to easily jump to the reference with no hassles like putting the book on hold (as is almost always the case on Overdrive) or reaching a check out limit or having to get in the car and go find a hard copy. Even the Kindle lenders library heavily restricts the number of books you can use at once. Having the full text of an ever-growing library at your fingertips is, if using Spotify is a close enough parallel, something that can't be fully appreciated until it's experienced.
- Price. If you usually buy at least one book a month and you can assume you'll probably do that indefinitely then it makes sense to instead start paying Oyster (or similar) indefinitely to get not one book a month, but all the books.
- Authors don't get paid. I think it's to early to say whether this will work out for authors or not. We don't know the business model. If it doesn't work for authors and publishers, they'll stop using it and Oyster will have to change their business model. In fact, this is the biggest risk as I see it. Netflix started with a good catalog and, for awhile, had a great catalog of movies. Now they're losing content and having to create their own, most of which I have no interest in. If publishers were to fall out of love with Oyster, Oyster's value would be severely diminished so they'll have to do what it takes to keep publishers (and hopefully by extension, authors) happy. One thing to consider, and maybe this is not as common as I'm guessing, but there are so many times where I've read a Kindle book and decided to buy a paper version to give the book a physical presence in my house. For certain authors, this could mean getting paid twice when people read their books.