I highly doubt that. Unless something was disastrously wrong in their design, the opex for cloud services should have been dwarfed by little things like payroll and office expenses.
I tried Oyster and ended up canceling after discovering that the books I wanted weren't available. The case is the same with Kindle unlimited.
The problem is that publishers make sure that the high demand books just aren't available via an "all you can read" plan so these end up with the scraps.
The alternative is a brick-and-mortar library system, where high demand books have six-month-long waitlists. But at least those high demand books are available.
Oyster was interesting but not a really interesting option: while the app was gorgeous, it didn't allow you to import books. I'm sure most people would rather consolidate their ebook purchases, and Amazon or Apple are better options for that.
Oyster was something that Google Play or Amazon Kindle Unlimited will almost certainly never be. The beautiful design and focus on details was just the surface. It felt like a company run by people that are passionate about reading and surfacing great books in engaging ways. There were no competing interests--it was about the books and while they weren't perfect, that passion was evident in everything they did. I, for one, will really miss them.
Kindle Unlimited has a killer feature Oyster never had -- Kindles. Reading books on phones is awful. Reading them on Kindles is the closest screens can come to reading on books.
"Kindle Unlimited has a killer feature Oyster never had -- Kindles."
That, and an enormous selection.
"Reading books on phones is awful."
It depends on the phone. Many people are perfectly happy reading for hours on a phone screen, particularly if they can choose the foreground/background colours (e.g. white on black for someone with an AMOLED screen).
"Reading them on Kindles is the closest screens can come to reading on books."
Well, in terms of display, it's the closest screens have_come, but it's unlikely to be the closest screens can come.
But, the thing which makes reading on a Kindle Paperwhite a pain for me, is that I can't flip through the book. Page turns are slower than on a paper book. I can't use my fingers to mark two different parts of the book, and move rapidly back and forth. Oh, and why can't I view images inline with the text?
I think it depends on the person more than the phone. I've used many different smartphones and tablets, not one of them is comfortable for reading a book-length text on. I know there are people who disagree. But everyone who doesn't disagree isn't a customer for Oyster.
I pay for Kindle Unlimited and can say first-hand that it has a terrible selection of mostly self-published and second rate books. Kindle itself of course has the best selection, but that's on a pay-per-book model.
The brilliant thing about Oyster was that they have so much first rate material in their "unlimited" model. There are plenty of arguments to be made about how many books you can read a month etc., but those arguments miss the point. Oyster opened a whole new browsing mindset where you could see a book cover, open it immediately and essentially flip through the book reading bits here and there and re-visit it later if it piqued your interest enough. It's unlike the library where, even in digital libraries, there are queues and "holds" and checkout limits. It's unlike Kindle where you have to commit by actually buying every book which becomes prohibitively expensive if you're just browsing, or Kindle Unlimited where the selection is, as I previously mentioned, dismal. It's hard to imagine until you've used it, but having been an Oyster subscriber for a couple years, I can say it's a shift in the way I think about books.
The way you feel about Oyster is the way I feel about Safari Books Online. It's just so awesome for books about software and IT. I wish there were an equivalent for other areas in which I have deep interest.
BTW I also really like Blinkist (a book summary site). They don't have as wide a selection as GetAbstract, but the Blinkist folks are thoughtful about the books they add, their summaries don't feel jarring, and the iPad app is smooth as butter.
Initially, I thought the Kindle Unlimited selection was lacking, but most searches turn up at least one or two useful books I'd have impulsively purchased anyway. Definitely worth it for me.
I have a (first generation) Kindle Paperwhite and don't understand why people rave about screen.
I prefer the screen on my 13-year-old computer monitor and would continue to prefer it even if it were the same size as the Paperwhite's screen provided that it were on a device as portable as the Paperwhite.
funny. i own one too and it blows every computer screen- especially when i want to read on the couch or in bed or on may veranda or in my garend- in short in sunlight...
In sunlight, yes, it is far superior to LCD technology, of course.
It's rare for me to want to read in sunlight, however.
To those who don't own one: just like any LCD, that is, any display in a modern laptop, tablet or smartphone excepting only smartphones with electroluminescent displays (which are probably restricted to some high-end models by Samsung, which have AMOLED displays) the display on the Paperwhite has a "diffuser", a white semi-transparent sheet of plastic inside which light bounces around a lot and an LED light source attached to one or more edges of the diffuser.
It is not possible to turn off light source completely off without turning off the Paperwhite's display (which means you cannot continue turning pages) though in daylight the light source is as good as off because of the much greater intensity of the light coming from the sky.
Point is that the "electronic ink" display technology in its latest iterations (i.e., since the introduction of the Paperwhite) is not that different from LCD technology; and I personally prefer the details of the implementation of LCD tech -- for reasons I cannot explain, but which probably derive from the fact that much more engineering effort has been expended on refining the tech.
Taken without any external context, this release is nonsensical, probably because they don't bother to say why they're shutting down or what the new opportunity is.
"Looking forward, we feel this is best seized by taking on new opportunities to fully realize our vision for ebooks." By... shutting down?
I would have appreciated a bit of plain-speaking here.
Totally speculating here but I'd assume the company was basically out of runway and couldn't find a reasonable out so negotiated the team to google to work on something else.
Option A: company/product dies, team is scattered. Option B: company/product dies, team remains together.
Investors fucked either way but with B at least team that works well together gets to continue to do so.
In a nutshell that's what happened when I was at chumby. Sadly the company we shifted to was terrible so there was a mass exodus anyway over the following year.
Yes, it seems like a lot of money to burn through, but as someone who only casually watches the overall startup market I've sort of lost the ability to be surprised when a startup burns through a ridiculous amount of money in a very short time, so it still seems like a plausible thing to me, though I'll reiterate I have no actual knowledge of what happened in this case.
It is possible for a company or its assets to be acquired without public acknowledgement of the deal. I'm not suggesting that this was the case, just a possibility.
I understand that Apple generally doesn't announce its acquisitions:
Is it fair to Oyster's investors? According to Engadget and Recode [1], "a portion" of Oyster's staff (including its CEO and co-founders) are jumping ship for Google's Play Books division. In short, this is an indirect acquisition -- Google is snapping up the core of the company without buying all of its assets.
And even more importantly, who cares? An acquihire is always a risk, as much as failure. Investors should (I imagine) be building that into their risk model.
Because there are assets other than just the people. Code, network relationships, reputation, service contracts, company partnerships, IP, etc. There can also be non-competes, NDAs, security clearances, stock vesting and a multitude of other agreements to factor in.
Assuming that the employees ever signed a Non Compete.
Google has no onus to be fair to Oyster's investors.
And let's be honest, if you become a challenge to the company to keep around, they'll have little loyalty to you. Why should the reverse be true? (usually)
From the linked recode article: "But sources said it will end up paying investors, who put a reported $17 million into the company, for the right to hire some of its staff."
That sure sounds similar to the anti-poaching agreements that Google, Apple, etc already got in trouble for.
What makes this different? Why shouldn't it just be a free market for these employees (and founders), and Google is free to offer that money directly to them, instead of needing to pay off the investors?
Maybe avoid issues with non-competes or claims of "stolen" IP later.
Or maybe, if the founders negotiated a deal for the team to stay together an investor might argue that that they are acting against the best interest of the company and might try to hold them liable for that.
Well, in a free market the possibility of a big player to poach the core of a company would be priced in by the investor. I'd expect to see a lot less equity and a lot more debt-like VC deals at vastly lower valuations.
So I'm not clear on this, was the employment agreement done before or after Oysterbooks officially announced that it was shutting down? BC that makes a difference...I find it odd that Google declined to comment to comment. Anyhow, great idea and really sad that it didn't work out.
> With that, we will be taking steps to sunset the existing Oyster service over the next several months.
If you have a company with a product and the product is being discontinued is it really so hard to just say that in English? The word "sunset" isn't even a verb.
Can someone explain the math here? 2012 they received 3M in seed funding. 2014 they received 14M USD. The picture on that boat shows 26 (?) people. So let's assume 26 people were always in the company just for kicks.
Between 2012 October and 2015 September they ran out of 17M USD. That's a burn rate of 5.67M USD per year.
For 26 employees, if we stupidly assumed no other costs, that nearly 218k USD salary per year.
Obviously that's not right. Let's assume they paid an average of 100k USD per year to each employee. That's 2.6M USD burnt for salaries. Which means that infrastructure, ad spend, and administrative costs and taxes (?) came to just over 3M USD per year.
And that's assuming they received ZERO money while they were running. Which is of course a load of tosh.
I'm unaware of the US market's costs in running a business but those numbers seem abnormal. Am I missing something here or does this seem plausible?
I've heard that when you factor in office space, desks, computers, benefits, etc.; the cost of hiring an employee to the company is roughly 2x their gross salary. (As for income tax, at that bracket, it's something like 40-50%?)
Somebody needs to revisit the numbers for capital costs of technology. When a new employee in 1995 cost $50,000, and their Compaq LTE-5300 Laptop, Docking station was $3000 - cost of computer was an issue (Particularly as you needed a lot of service / repair to keep it running, configured) - And you were lucky to get 2 years of service.
In 2015, a new employee costs $150,000, and their computer still costs $3000 (or less) - and now lasts at least 2 years, and in many cases, can be stretched out to three years.
In Redwood City, industrial/quasi commercial space in 2007 was going for $1.50/sq/foot - figure * 200 per employee = $3600/year for office space.
Desk, chairs, cubes, etc.. cost around $1500/employee delivered/installed (Always buy used. Add an extra $600 if you want Aeron Chairs).
I would be interested in seeing if anybody has a soup-nuts assessment for all of the office costs for an employee in 2015 in the valley.
Wages are at most 70% of the cost of an employee to a business, and possibly as low as 50% of the fully burdened cost. For an employee to gross $100k on their paystub (before their own taxes), a competitive employer in NYC is likely paying a full burden (with payroll taxes, insurance, other benefits, admin overhead, office space, and supplies) not too far from $218k.
Wow. That's amazing. I genuinely had no idea that the costs of running could be that high. Thanks for sharing that info. It boggles my mind as to how much money startups probably need just to stay break even.
I think the parent's estimate is a little high, but here's what I know. w2 employers are responsible for
- 6.2% SS + 1.45% medicare fica taxes
- health insurance, of which the employer's share can easily run $1k/mo for a couple in their 30s
- 1.5% payroll tax if in sf, or 0.34% payroll tax for mta in nyc;
so if someone makes $100k in sf, the employer pays
(1.0 + 0.0765 fica + 0.015 city payroll tax) * 100k
+ 12*1k health insurance
+ 12 * $1200 monthly rent
+ 12 * $100 snacks/office supplies
+ maybe $500/year for unemployment insurance and various other fees
totaling (1.0765 + 0.015) * 1e5 + 12*(1e3 + 1.2e3 + 100) + 500 = $137k. That doesn't include any activities, hardware, or meals. If you buy lunch, a former employer budgeted $14 per person day, so assuming 250 work days = $3500/year
You also have to consider employees who make money vs. employees who cost money. Administrative overhead, management, etc. aren't often major contributors to revenue, but their cost metrics are the same. So the burden on money making employees can be considered to be even higher.
You can get some economies of scale with more revenue generating employees vs. cost center employees, but no matter what, as companies grow they need cost center employees to make the ship sail.
Another 0.9% ($939 max) for CA SDI, $250 workers comp, and the employer probably has some sort of life & disability of their own as well, call it another $500. Payroll & benefits admin for $500. $12k health insurance contribution seems low, but I suppose population skews to 20s and single.
I do think 70% is about the best you can really do ($142k), but I agree 50% would be lavish. Throw in a regular dinner program, or some regular offsite meals & entertainment doesn't hurt. Since 274(e) expenses are fully deductible, IRS is basically paying for 35-40% of that annual picnic, holiday dinner, Caribbean retreat, etc. so it's smart for companies to shell out some real money for these outings.
I'm pretty sure I saw them around in 2011 so I don't understand why report wrong age of the company here? Note they did a seed round of $3 million in 2012.
Are you sure they ran out of cash? I haven't read that anywhere. It's possible they found the problem intractable and decided to return the remaining investor cash.
Fair point. Was going by the numbers of 3M USD seed round in 2012, and 17M in 2014. Without much major press and valuations being made public, it's kind of safe to assume that the 3M USD was burning out by the end of 2013. 14M from 2013 to 2015 would be 7M per year. Assuming rising costs from both running the business, 5M and 9M across two years seems plausible.
Given the number of employees in the company (26), 3 co founders, who form half of a 6 C-level team, it's likely that the team size increased along that curve as well (3M, 5M, 9M). This is entirely speculation at this point.
But after some further reading, it's possible that their business model may have just been not profitable. For each reader who read more than 10% of a book, the full retail price of the book is paid out to publishers. For people reading 3-4 books a month, they would be making a loss from those customers.
If you aren't the sort that reads 3-4 books a month, then you are also probably not the kind of person who spends a 10 USD subscription service to an 'all-you-can-read' ebook service. Therefore the larger base of customers there were probably loss makers. So assuming a growing customer base made up of loss makers it's entirely likely that they burnt out funds. Now that the running costs of a business in general were clarified in a reply above it actually makes sense that the money could have run out.
An easy way to guesstimate how long a company's investment will last (given no other revenue) is to just assume each person they have on staff costs between $200-$250k per year.
It's not perfectly accurate, but it's surprisingly good in terms of figuring out runway. Staffing costs are typically the lions share of business costs for software companies. This gets weird if they do lots of advertising, or have enormous hosting costs or something, but it's usually on the order of 70-80% of the total operating costs (by comparison renting physical locations like offices is usually among the cheapest).
So let's assume they had 26 people, that's between $5.2m-6.5m per year...right in line with what the actual math shows ($5.67m).
There's other ways of estimating, like if you think a company is running cheap you can go with the old "10 people for a million dollars a year" guess, but I've found that to be increasingly inaccurate.
The reason the numbers look like this isn't because that's what people get paid, but because of all the other cost burdens on having employees -- most of which are already covered here.
It's also one of those things that makes me scratch my head when startups hire huge staffs too early. In good markets, hiring loads of people isn't a huge deal, but burning millions per year you don't have doesn't make much sense.
My 81 year old father figured out years ago how to connect is Kindle to his local public library.
He literally checks out nearly any book, all FOR FREE and reads it on his kindle.
Maybe this is a US centric thing and Oyster was targeting international users. But local libraries have been offering this service of digitally checking out books (even current books) for free for nearly 10 years.
Don't get me wrong. I never like reading about businesses shutting down because that implies people will be losing their job. I just never understood this business to begin with, maybe someone could shed some light on what I'm missing
I'm lucky to live in a county with a good library system that supports this model, but what about the rest of the country? Are they all served as well as me?
$10/mo doesn't seem too outrageous if you have no other alternatives. If you are a heavy reader then this makes sense vs. buying from Amazon or another retailer.
I suppose it comes down to strength of library - for $10/mo, can you match other book seller's content? I took a look for a few books I've been reading recently - it seems about a 50% match. Personally, not for me.
> My 81 year old father figured out years ago how to connect is Kindle to his local public library.
I am a full time professional software developer and I do a lot of technology things on the side and have a technology side business. It took me forever to connect a kindle to my library, and when I did, most of the books I wanted weren't available.
It also depends on the library. My small suburban library doesn't have a lot of ebook offerings, but my friend's big urban library has about a 75% hit rate on books I want to read.
My local library offers digital checkouts that have terrible availability, limited time only and a limited number of titles in the first place. Your dad is lucky, and/or his reading taste skews more available than mine.
I have never heard of this product until it became discontinued - which sucks.
To me the statement reads like an adult explaining the horrors of war to a 5 year old who glorified war without knowing the reality.
Was it really necessary to wrap a simple notice of closure/costumer apology up in such an overly tame and submissive manner?
Why not something concise:
"We sincerely apologize to our loyal customers, and potential future customers that within x amount of time product y will be discontinued for various reasons, which we are currently not at liberty of discussing in a public forum. Thank you very much for your patronage and support. Foremost we are ensuring that our existing customers receive the most professional and respectful treatment.
This post has been on the front page for 9 hours and yet no mention of their most direct competitor, Scribd? Not a good sign for Scribd, that's for sure.
Both Scribd and Oyster had a much wider selection of books from major publishers than Kindle Unlimited. They both had 3 of the big 5 publishers on board.
Myself, I love Scribd, and I suggest you give it a try too. I haven't tried Oyster because it wasn't available in my country.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadhttp://recode.net/2015/09/21/oyster-books-shuts-down-team-he...
Runway has its limits.
http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
The problem is that publishers make sure that the high demand books just aren't available via an "all you can read" plan so these end up with the scraps.
I still miss Readmill, though… a LOT!! :(
SHIELD WALL!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTYz439cA5w
That, and an enormous selection.
"Reading books on phones is awful."
It depends on the phone. Many people are perfectly happy reading for hours on a phone screen, particularly if they can choose the foreground/background colours (e.g. white on black for someone with an AMOLED screen).
"Reading them on Kindles is the closest screens can come to reading on books."
Well, in terms of display, it's the closest screens have_come, but it's unlikely to be the closest screens can come.
But, the thing which makes reading on a Kindle Paperwhite a pain for me, is that I can't flip through the book. Page turns are slower than on a paper book. I can't use my fingers to mark two different parts of the book, and move rapidly back and forth. Oh, and why can't I view images inline with the text?
I think it depends on the person more than the phone. I've used many different smartphones and tablets, not one of them is comfortable for reading a book-length text on. I know there are people who disagree. But everyone who doesn't disagree isn't a customer for Oyster.
The brilliant thing about Oyster was that they have so much first rate material in their "unlimited" model. There are plenty of arguments to be made about how many books you can read a month etc., but those arguments miss the point. Oyster opened a whole new browsing mindset where you could see a book cover, open it immediately and essentially flip through the book reading bits here and there and re-visit it later if it piqued your interest enough. It's unlike the library where, even in digital libraries, there are queues and "holds" and checkout limits. It's unlike Kindle where you have to commit by actually buying every book which becomes prohibitively expensive if you're just browsing, or Kindle Unlimited where the selection is, as I previously mentioned, dismal. It's hard to imagine until you've used it, but having been an Oyster subscriber for a couple years, I can say it's a shift in the way I think about books.
BTW I also really like Blinkist (a book summary site). They don't have as wide a selection as GetAbstract, but the Blinkist folks are thoughtful about the books they add, their summaries don't feel jarring, and the iPad app is smooth as butter.
I prefer the screen on my 13-year-old computer monitor and would continue to prefer it even if it were the same size as the Paperwhite's screen provided that it were on a device as portable as the Paperwhite.
It's rare for me to want to read in sunlight, however.
To those who don't own one: just like any LCD, that is, any display in a modern laptop, tablet or smartphone excepting only smartphones with electroluminescent displays (which are probably restricted to some high-end models by Samsung, which have AMOLED displays) the display on the Paperwhite has a "diffuser", a white semi-transparent sheet of plastic inside which light bounces around a lot and an LED light source attached to one or more edges of the diffuser.
It is not possible to turn off light source completely off without turning off the Paperwhite's display (which means you cannot continue turning pages) though in daylight the light source is as good as off because of the much greater intensity of the light coming from the sky.
Point is that the "electronic ink" display technology in its latest iterations (i.e., since the introduction of the Paperwhite) is not that different from LCD technology; and I personally prefer the details of the implementation of LCD tech -- for reasons I cannot explain, but which probably derive from the fact that much more engineering effort has been expended on refining the tech.
"Looking forward, we feel this is best seized by taking on new opportunities to fully realize our vision for ebooks." By... shutting down?
I would have appreciated a bit of plain-speaking here.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/21/oyster-shutting-down/
Option A: company/product dies, team is scattered. Option B: company/product dies, team remains together.
Investors fucked either way but with B at least team that works well together gets to continue to do so.
In a nutshell that's what happened when I was at chumby. Sadly the company we shifted to was terrible so there was a mass exodus anyway over the following year.
I understand that Apple generally doesn't announce its acquisitions:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/05/21/tight-lipped-apple...
[1] http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/21/oyster-shutting-down/
The alternative is ... what?
-- Actually it looks like Google will pay back investors some or all of their investment.
Google has no onus to be fair to Oyster's investors.
And let's be honest, if you become a challenge to the company to keep around, they'll have little loyalty to you. Why should the reverse be true? (usually)
That sure sounds similar to the anti-poaching agreements that Google, Apple, etc already got in trouble for.
What makes this different? Why shouldn't it just be a free market for these employees (and founders), and Google is free to offer that money directly to them, instead of needing to pay off the investors?
Or maybe, if the founders negotiated a deal for the team to stay together an investor might argue that that they are acting against the best interest of the company and might try to hold them liable for that.
If you have a company with a product and the product is being discontinued is it really so hard to just say that in English? The word "sunset" isn't even a verb.
Between 2012 October and 2015 September they ran out of 17M USD. That's a burn rate of 5.67M USD per year.
For 26 employees, if we stupidly assumed no other costs, that nearly 218k USD salary per year.
Obviously that's not right. Let's assume they paid an average of 100k USD per year to each employee. That's 2.6M USD burnt for salaries. Which means that infrastructure, ad spend, and administrative costs and taxes (?) came to just over 3M USD per year.
And that's assuming they received ZERO money while they were running. Which is of course a load of tosh.
I'm unaware of the US market's costs in running a business but those numbers seem abnormal. Am I missing something here or does this seem plausible?
In 2015, a new employee costs $150,000, and their computer still costs $3000 (or less) - and now lasts at least 2 years, and in many cases, can be stretched out to three years.
In Redwood City, industrial/quasi commercial space in 2007 was going for $1.50/sq/foot - figure * 200 per employee = $3600/year for office space.
Desk, chairs, cubes, etc.. cost around $1500/employee delivered/installed (Always buy used. Add an extra $600 if you want Aeron Chairs).
I would be interested in seeing if anybody has a soup-nuts assessment for all of the office costs for an employee in 2015 in the valley.
- 6.2% SS + 1.45% medicare fica taxes
- health insurance, of which the employer's share can easily run $1k/mo for a couple in their 30s
- 1.5% payroll tax if in sf, or 0.34% payroll tax for mta in nyc;
so if someone makes $100k in sf, the employer pays
totaling (1.0765 + 0.015) * 1e5 + 12*(1e3 + 1.2e3 + 100) + 500 = $137k. That doesn't include any activities, hardware, or meals. If you buy lunch, a former employer budgeted $14 per person day, so assuming 250 work days = $3500/yearYou can get some economies of scale with more revenue generating employees vs. cost center employees, but no matter what, as companies grow they need cost center employees to make the ship sail.
I do think 70% is about the best you can really do ($142k), but I agree 50% would be lavish. Throw in a regular dinner program, or some regular offsite meals & entertainment doesn't hurt. Since 274(e) expenses are fully deductible, IRS is basically paying for 35-40% of that annual picnic, holiday dinner, Caribbean retreat, etc. so it's smart for companies to shell out some real money for these outings.
tangent: security via obesity is a cool idea.
> In a blog post on Monday, Oyster’s founders said they were “taking steps to sunset” the company’s service, which launched in 2012.
Other data like crunchbase pointed to 2012 too.
http://recode.net/2015/09/21/oyster-books-shuts-down-team-he...
Given the number of employees in the company (26), 3 co founders, who form half of a 6 C-level team, it's likely that the team size increased along that curve as well (3M, 5M, 9M). This is entirely speculation at this point.
But after some further reading, it's possible that their business model may have just been not profitable. For each reader who read more than 10% of a book, the full retail price of the book is paid out to publishers. For people reading 3-4 books a month, they would be making a loss from those customers.
If you aren't the sort that reads 3-4 books a month, then you are also probably not the kind of person who spends a 10 USD subscription service to an 'all-you-can-read' ebook service. Therefore the larger base of customers there were probably loss makers. So assuming a growing customer base made up of loss makers it's entirely likely that they burnt out funds. Now that the running costs of a business in general were clarified in a reply above it actually makes sense that the money could have run out.
It's not perfectly accurate, but it's surprisingly good in terms of figuring out runway. Staffing costs are typically the lions share of business costs for software companies. This gets weird if they do lots of advertising, or have enormous hosting costs or something, but it's usually on the order of 70-80% of the total operating costs (by comparison renting physical locations like offices is usually among the cheapest).
So let's assume they had 26 people, that's between $5.2m-6.5m per year...right in line with what the actual math shows ($5.67m).
There's other ways of estimating, like if you think a company is running cheap you can go with the old "10 people for a million dollars a year" guess, but I've found that to be increasingly inaccurate.
The reason the numbers look like this isn't because that's what people get paid, but because of all the other cost burdens on having employees -- most of which are already covered here.
It's also one of those things that makes me scratch my head when startups hire huge staffs too early. In good markets, hiring loads of people isn't a huge deal, but burning millions per year you don't have doesn't make much sense.
My 81 year old father figured out years ago how to connect is Kindle to his local public library.
He literally checks out nearly any book, all FOR FREE and reads it on his kindle.
Maybe this is a US centric thing and Oyster was targeting international users. But local libraries have been offering this service of digitally checking out books (even current books) for free for nearly 10 years.
Don't get me wrong. I never like reading about businesses shutting down because that implies people will be losing their job. I just never understood this business to begin with, maybe someone could shed some light on what I'm missing
$10/mo doesn't seem too outrageous if you have no other alternatives. If you are a heavy reader then this makes sense vs. buying from Amazon or another retailer.
I suppose it comes down to strength of library - for $10/mo, can you match other book seller's content? I took a look for a few books I've been reading recently - it seems about a 50% match. Personally, not for me.
I am a full time professional software developer and I do a lot of technology things on the side and have a technology side business. It took me forever to connect a kindle to my library, and when I did, most of the books I wanted weren't available.
To me the statement reads like an adult explaining the horrors of war to a 5 year old who glorified war without knowing the reality. Was it really necessary to wrap a simple notice of closure/costumer apology up in such an overly tame and submissive manner?
Why not something concise:
"We sincerely apologize to our loyal customers, and potential future customers that within x amount of time product y will be discontinued for various reasons, which we are currently not at liberty of discussing in a public forum. Thank you very much for your patronage and support. Foremost we are ensuring that our existing customers receive the most professional and respectful treatment.
Sincerely - company z team."
Less bullshit, more realshit.
Both Scribd and Oyster had a much wider selection of books from major publishers than Kindle Unlimited. They both had 3 of the big 5 publishers on board.
Myself, I love Scribd, and I suggest you give it a try too. I haven't tried Oyster because it wasn't available in my country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuckedcompany.com