Last week Macmillan announced that it would double its ebook offerings on Oyster and Scribd, adding about 1,000 titles to each ebook subscription service, says Digital Book World.The additions include titles of popular back-list fiction as well as nonfiction ebooks, including titles from well-known authors like Rachel Cusk, John McPhee, Grace Paley and Robert Jordan, reports Digital Trends. The expansion will not, however, include Macmillan’s new releases. This news comes just six months after Macmillan’s initial foray into the ebook subscription market.Part of this expansion with Oyster and Scribd includes 300 children’s ebook titles, a market Macmillan has been testing with Epic!, a children’s ebook subscription service. The 18-month-old Epic! provides readers 12 and under with unlimited access to over 10,000 ebooks, on and offline, for $4.99 per month after a 30 day trial membership.
While these additions to the Oyster and Scribd catalogs are newsworthy, perhaps the more important news is that the ebook subscription market is still trying to find its sweet spot. At the beginning of July, Scribd announced it was cutting back its romance catalog because its author and publisher payouts were not in line with subscription pricing. In other words, romance readers were reading more than Scribd could eventually pay out. In related news, in April, Scribd boosted its audiobook library, adding 9,000 new titles to a library that now totals more than 45,000 audiobooks.Oyster is also in the news. In April, the ebook subscription service launched an ebook store platform, so readers can either purchase or read a book from Oyster, giving readers access to books they didn’t have via Oyster previously. By signing the Big Five publishers to this deal, Oyster put itself in direct competition with Amazon’s retail book business.Insider Take:Oyster, Scribd and Epic! all started in 2013. Since then, they’ve wooed the Big Five publishers and their readers, solidifying relationships, expanding their catalogs, and experimenting with different product mixes. There have been a lot of successes along the way, but as evidenced by Scribd’s reduction of its romance catalog a few weeks ago, there are growing pains as well. And, of course, they have to battle a well-known brand – Amazon – who launched Kindle Unlimited last summer.Each company needs to figure out its financial tipping point – including subscription pricing as well as publisher and author payouts. It also needs to define its target market and ideal product mix. Epic! seems to have found its niche with the children’s ebook market, but it will likely have more competition as the ebook subscription market matures.Oyster and Scribd have slightly different product mixes, but much of their ebook catalogs from the Big Five will be similar. The companies are priced similarly (Scribd is $8.99/month and Oyster is $9.95/month), so they’ll need to differentiate themselves in terms of target market and/or product mix to get their desired share of the ebook market, and to survive against Amazon.
