Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

"Oyster", the self-described "Netflix for books", announced it is closing.

Oyster E-Book Subscription Service Shuts Down.

Oyster offered a $10/month subscription to read all the books you cared to read.

Several publishers, including Hachette & Penguin, expressed satisfaction.

It also seems Google may be somehow involved in acquiring Oyster's former employees.

I've never even heard of this. Was it like the library where there were only so many people able to read a book at a time, so you had to wait until it was available?

$10 a month is cheap! Shame it failed.

It's not a lot different from Scribd or Amazon's Kindle Unlimited. The catch to all those is none of them have many big-name, current bestseller books from major publishers.

In which case, is it worth the money?

Asimov predicted something similar to these services in one of his essays...he forsaw a time when we would have hand-held computers (like our tablets and smartphones) connected to a world-wide library (i guess by something like our wi-fi)...writers would be paid every time someone "checked out" their book from the library, with the reader paying a fee for x number of check-outs...students would read for free, and everyone in the world would get a small number, say like 5, number of free checkouts a year

Seriously forward thinking for the 1950's!

not sure when he wrote the essay, but Isaac passed before smart phones and tablets, so he made good guesses

I don't know why I had the 50's in my brain for Asimov?

I just looked and he was quite active up through the 80's. We had computers then, remember using them in HS (graduated in '89), but no tablets!

I remember the cell phone my roommate's dad used to make us take on road trips. :) It was in a suitcase like thing with a big shoulder strap and it had an actual hand held part with the curly cord like we had in our kitchen at home growing up. *cracks up* I'd LOVE to show that to my niece. She's 7 and she always gets annoyed when she uses my computer, because there is a mouse instead of a touch screen.

lol...Asimov used a TRS-80 (better known as the "Trash-80") to write on when they were around...used to do ads for em too...Isaac was very active writeing SF from the 30s to the 50s....then he started writing mostly popular science, but never totaly turned his back on SF...lucky for us he did more SF before he died

Amelia wrote: "In which case, is it worth the money?"

I suppose that depends on what you like to read.

If you want to read the latest SF&F from the big authors, then it's probably not a great deal for you. And if you want to read the old classics, and they are out of copyright, you can just as easily read them for free from Project Gutenberg.

But if you want to read a large number of books from mid-tier and indie authors, you might find it's to your liking, I suppose. Earlier this year, Scribd decided to drop a lot of Romance novels from their catalogue. Apparently fans of romance novels read a lot of them, and Scridb was losing money on them. (Which may say more about their royalty contracts than their readers.)

I have a Kindle, and so I'm entitled to borrow one e-book a month from Amazon as part of their Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL), which is a similar catalogue to their Kindle Unlimited service. Many months (such as this one) I can't even spot one book I want to take the time to read (as opposed to spending the time reading a new purchase.) So while I've read a few enjoyable novels from KOLL, I don't think I'd make much use of KU.

Gutenberg is a bit limited in scope. For a myriad of old SF I look no further than Open Library,the offshoot of Internet Archive. The books are scanned so the quality isnt too great sometimes,but I am happy since I can access a huge number of the old SF I like so much for free,especially for my Defining Books 1950-1999 over on WWEnd. You can borrow a book for two weeks,and renew if no-one wants it,or go on the waiting list.I find the kindle just useless for accessing books I want to read. They are either not available (C J Cherryh in particular is badly represented) or very expensive.Just look at what I have been able to read this year alone for free!
John Varley - Titan
Ursula LeGuin - Word for World is Forest
Cordwainer Smith - Norstrilia
Poul Anderson - Ensign Flandry
Samuel R Delany - Empire Star
Susan Cooper - Dark is Rising series
Andre Norton - Uncharted Stars
Arthur C Clarke - Islands in the Sky
Joan D Vinge - The Snow Queen
Arthur C Clarke - The Sands of Mars
Poul Anderson - The Enemy Stars
And I will have access to more books for challenges this year such as
Isaac Asimov - The Currents of Space
Isaac Asimov - The Ends of Eternity
C J Cherryh - Serpent's Reach
Gordon R Dickson - Dorsai
Ken Grimwood - Replay
Larry Niven - The Integral Trees
Andre Norton - The Stars Are Ours!
Clifford D Simak - City
Alan Steele - Orbital Decay
A Van Vogt - Voyage of the Space Beagle
James Blish - Cities in Flight
Plus a veritable host of books by Niven,Silverberg,Simak,Piers Anthony,Zelazny,Clarke,Asimov,Andre Norton,Harry Harrison,.Lester Del Rey and a whole host of other old authors. I know quite a few of these are now available on the Gateway series,but they are very expensive. If you need to fill an ignorance gap,or read a classic book without necessarily having a permanent copy,I would definitely advise you to have a good look at Open Library.
Of course,most of you young'uns would probably never want to see such old books,but its amazing just how many people still get great pleasure from these ancient books. How do I know? Over on Worlds Without End we are doing a challenge,to read one book from each year from 1950 - 1999. Checking out the stats for the challenges we see
1950s books 48 people read 314 books
1960s books - 32 people read 176 books
1970s books 24 people read 69 books,though many are still progressing through the challenge. However its the forum discussion views which are most impressive. No less than 10,736 views for the 1950s forum,compared with 837 views for the 60s,and 347 for the 70s. Thats pretty impressive. Even after many decades people are reading the 50s books,and thousands of views show people are interested in that decade.It was a decade when mankind felt very uncertain about whether civilisation would survive at all,and it led to fine classic works.
So any young'uns with the desire to read some great SF, Open Library is a fabulous resource!