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Originally Posted by HarryT
I'm not familiar with this service. Is it something like Amazon's "Kindle Unlimited" service, where you can read as many books as you want for a monthly subscription?
It sounds as if they have a flawed business model, if they're taking in a fixed amount per subscriber, but paying out an amount that varies with the amount that the subscriber reads. KU's model of paying out a fixed "pot" of money each month that's split pro rata between every book borrowed seems more sustainable, although less desirable to publishers.
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You nailed it.
But there is one big difference: Scribd and Oyster are both standalone services that aspire to be substitutes for ebookstores (from the publisher point of view) whereas Kindle unlimited is a *supplement* to the Kindle ebookstore and openly presented as a promotional tool for Indie publishers rather than a substitute for sales. (It is more of a substitute for free promos and permafree.)
The idea behind KU is to get ebooks in front of subscribers to help them discover new authors so they will then go on to buy other books from them.
The idea behind Scribd and Oyster is more along the lines of weaning subscribers away from buying from Amazon. Not a good idea, really.
But the hype of "all you can read for $9!!!" was supposed to make the services king. It didn't. The books being app-locked and not available on dedicated readers torpedoed that. That reduced the pool of customers to the most voracious readers and inevitably led to this purge. Few observers are surprised. Other than they lasted 18 months at it. Lots of VC money gone...
It's most likely the beginning of a death spiral for their subscription service.