Oyster and eReatah have recieved a lot of media attention recently, and especially Oyster was called the Netflix for books. But what if you live outside the US? What are the options then? First, this list is very European centered, because I didn’t find much informations about non European services, even if I am sure they exist. ( I know a Chinese company planned a subscription services last year.)
24Symbols is a Spanish start up. In English they have mostly public domain books, but in Spanish they have a rather good sortiment of popular titles. What more, I get the impression that they are working on getting more content. Right now they have around 15 000 e-books
Litfy is a Swedish startup, and normally I would be that only offers books in the public domain. I have no idea if they are planning on getting more recent content.
Ridr and Mofido is both Danish but they have a different approach. Riidr costs 10 dollar, and is a lot like Kindle Lending Library, in that the customers only can download one e-book or Audiobook per month. Mofido costs a bit more, but allows the reader to reads as many books he/ she wants. I am not sure how many e-books Riidr offers, but Mofido offers around 5 000
Skoobe is a German start up, that is owned by Bertelsmann and Holzberger. They costs 10 euro per month, but offers the first month for half the price. They have 25 000 titles right now, and I think they have a rather good sortiment. ( Or at least they should, considering who owns them!). Their webpage hints that they are launching in English soon. I am crossing my fingers that they will not be US or UK only.
Scribd also launched an subscription service recently, which works the same way Oyster does. With the exception that their service is worldwide and offers both Android and IOs apps. A longer review is coming.
What about Sweden, where I live,are there any subscription services available?
Yes. But they offer a mix of e-books and audio books. E2go offers pollets, 1-4 books for 15-25 dollar. Storytel’s e-book subscription haven’t launched yet, but they offer streamed audiobooks for 30 dollar, and their plan is to offer e-books for an additional 5 dollar. There are also a couple of publishers that offers subscriptions, but there isn’t any kind of all you can read subscriptions. Without the audiobooks, I am not sure that a subscription service would be viable since Sweden have a very good library system. In fact, right now all e-books distributed through Elib is available at libraries. I have a feeling that might change soon, since both Elib and Publit are launching more flexible library systems.
That said, if a store, say Bokon, offered subscriptions for English and Swedish e-books, I would leap on it. Even if Bokon are planning on offering some sort of subscriptions ( because there is a tab in my account called Subscriptions), I doubt it will include English e-books since that would be too complicated.