Oyster, the Netflix-like subscription service for books, has announced via a blog post that it’s closing up shop.
But as Re/Code reports, many Oyster staff members — including its CEO and co-founders — have already found new homes at Google.
While Oyster’s team was posting its swan song, Re/Code states that “a rep for the search giant confirmed that ‘a portion’ of the Oyster team has joined Google Play Books…People familiar with the company say that CEO Eric Stromberg and co-founders Andrew Brown and Willem Van Lancker are part of the team joining Google.”
The Oyster founders wrote in the blog post that while they “made incredible progress” toward their goal of getting people to read books on smartphones, they also “couldn’t be more excited about the future of e-books and mobile reading.”
Oyster staff added that smartphones will become the “primary reading device globally over the next decade” for people worldwide.
Started two years ago, Oyster was a monthly subscription service that offered about a million titles via your smartphone, tablet or other web browser for $9.95 per month.
Whether or not Google’s hiring of Oyster staff means they’re getting more serious about going after the e-book market is still unclear, a space that is dominated by Amazon, its Kindle Unlimited offering over a million titles for $9.99 per month.
Oyster will be phased out over the next few months. If you’re a subscriber, look for info soon, or you can request a refund via refunds@oysterbooks.com.
