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вЂњItвЂ™s not for all people, nor for all content,вЂќ Newby says. The project sees e-book subscription companies as important players in a healthy literary ecosystem.

#Willem van lancker free#

Today, Project Gutenberg has more than 40,000 works in its digital collection, all of which are free to the public. production director of Project Gutenberg, which in 1971 became the first service to provide e-books. вЂњThe idea of a small price for ongoing access to a library of content seems a good one,вЂќ says Gregory Newby, chief executive and U.S. As of January, 32В percent of Americans owned an e-reader and 42В percent owned a tablet computer. (Only 4В percent of the respondents said they read e-books exclusively.) Pew attributes this jump in e-book consumption to the increase in people owning electronic reading devices. A January report by the Pew Research Center said that of the 76 percent of Americans who had read a book last year, 28В percent had read an e-book, up from 23 percent in 2012. More users are reading books electronically. вЂњFor me, it was really about how can we make digital books fantastic in their own right and the best they can be, and not trying to mimic their print cousins and predecessors.вЂќ вЂњAll the metaphors and carry-overs from physical books were still there,вЂќ Van Lancker said. Oyster made a conscious decision to launch the iPhone app first and the tablet next, and it chose to focus on creating a reading experience that didnвЂ™t try to duplicate the feel of a book. Earlier this year, the start-up announced it had raised an additional $14В million and that it plans to expand the team. Oyster launched its iPhone app in September last year and went to market with an iPad app. The service is the brainchild of Willem Van Lancker, Eric Stromberg and Andrew Brown, who pulled in $3В million in seed funding in 2012 from several investors, including founders of PayPal and initial backers of Facebook. Unlike the public library, which has only a few licenses for each e-book title, an unlimited number of users can read Oyster books at once. Launched in September 2012, Oyster developed an app for Apple devices that allows readers unlimited access to 100,000-plus e-book titles for $9.95 a month.

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We want to build the company that takes e-books into the next wave.But will it take off like the subscription TV and movie site has? 'We want to be the Amazon of the next 10 years. 'Amazon paved the way in e-books,' Van Lancker says. Perhaps as a result, the company offers some 200,000 more titles than AmazonвЂ™s own e-book subscription service. We really built Oyster as a book store.'Д«ut perhaps most important, Oyster's relationship with publishers - and AmazonвЂ™s burning of those relationships - have smoothed its path. It's that model of efficiency, but there isn't the beauty, the design, and the discovery. As Amazon thinks about most businesses, it's akin to a warehouse. 'There's a search bar on Amazon, and others where you know the book you want and you go and find it. 'To date, the e-book retail experience has been about efficiency,' cofounder Willem Van Lancker told Business Insider. OysterвЂ™s aesthetic and usability top AmazonвЂ™s in some ways, including highly user-friendly curation of lists. What Amazon may have taught publishers and startups like Oyster is that the disrupter can also be disrupted. The publishing world seemed dazed for years and years, but seems to be waking up to its own opportunities to take back some territory. Amazon first disrupted, then dominated the books market, first in physical books, then e-books.