For quite a while now, I have been toying with the idea of trying out one or all of the e-book subscription services: Oyster, Scribd, and new kind on the block Amazon.
But I just read this article which says maybe I should forget all of them and head to my public library --- digitally, of course. Most likely, they will have a better e-book selection of bestsellers than these services.
Anybody out there have any experience with this? What's your take on it?
CLICK ON TITLE TO READ THE ARTICLE
While scrolling through my Facebook page yesterday, I noticed a little advertisement from Oyster Books. They were promoting their book service, a kind of Netflix for books. For a fee of $9.95 a month, you have access to over 100,000 books. I thought that sounded like a great deal, so I decided to click on the link to see what it was all about.
My first impression was that the website looked beautiful, very aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, and with a free month trial, what's not to like? Sign-up was a cinch, and I downloaded the app to my iPad Mini in seconds. After only a few minutes I had some excellent books to get me started.
I must say I'm very pleased to see that there is a good selection of non-fiction books represented on Oyster Books. I do enjoy reading fiction, but non-fiction reading is really my passion, so I'm glad that I was not disappointed.
My only critique is that Oyster Books is currently only available as an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch app, and is not available on Android, Nook, or Kindle devices. There is also not a reader app for a Mac or PC. Hopefully this will change with the future.
Happy reading in 2014!!!
From the New York Times article by DAVID STREITFELD:
"Before the Internet, books were written — and published — blindly, hopefully. Sometimes they sold, usually they did not, but no one had a clue what readers did when they opened them up. Did they skip or skim? Slow down or speed up when the end was in sight? Linger over the sex scenes?
A wave of start-ups is using technology to answer these questions — and help writers give readers more of what they want. The companies get reading data from subscribers who, for a flat monthly fee, buy access to an array of titles, which they can read on a variety of devices.
. . . Some general insights: The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and erotica fastest of all. . . readers are 25 percent more likely to finish books that are broken up into shorter chapters. That is an inevitable consequence of people reading in short sessions during the day on an iPhone."
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