The ebook subscription wars are heating up. Although Amazon has yet to sign a big-five publisher to its Kindle Unlimited service, competitors Scribd and Oyster already have a new inductee after Macmillian signed a deal to bring 1,000 ebooks to both services.
Macmillian followed in the footsteps of HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, both of which have already added their ebooks to Scribd and Oyster. Popular titles including Sea of Poppies, Full House, The Winter King, and many more are now available on both services. Ebooks from famous writers like Janet Evanovich, George R.R. Martin, Robert Ludlum, and others joined the ranks, too.
Oyster is also getting new sci-fi and fantasy ebooks from Tor, literary fiction from FSG, and fiction from St. Martin’s Press. Other ebooks from new partners such as Candlewick, New York Review Books Classics, Capstone, Soho Press, Bloomsbury, and more are also available on Oyster, bringing the service’s ebook count beyond one million. Old partners Simon & Shuster and HarperCollins continue to add thousands of titles to Oyster’s virtual library.
For its own part, Scribd still has significantly less ebooks than Oyster, but it’s catching up with more than half a million of its own titles, and a slew of audiobooks to boot. A subscription to Oyster costs just under $10 per month, while Scribd is slightly cheaper at $9. Oyster doesn’t have audiobooks on its platform yet, but that could very well change, as the three major ebook subscription services duke it out over the next few years.
