Eric Stromberg

Oyster announced today a significant shift in its business model with the launch of its own ebook store. The former subscription-only platform is hoping that its dedication to a high quality reading experience and engaging discovery platform will sway consumers from lower-priced options like Amazon.

Oyster, a Netflix-style service for e-books, has brought on its first chief financial officer, Jeannie Mun.

Before joining Oyster, Mun spent a lot of time in the ad world, having recently served as CFO at ad company MediaMath, and before that working as vice president of finance and strategy at ad software company Operative.

So why join an e-book startup? Mun said she was starting to think about "the next stage of my career," and after meeting with Oyster CEO Eric Stromberg, she became "more and more excited" about finding a role that combined her experience

Two down, three to go.

Simon & Schuster announced Wednesday that some of its titles are now available on Oyster and Scribd, two of the leading e-book subscription services. The move makes Simon & Schuster the second of the Big 5 publishers to experiment with the relatively new e-book subscription market.

As part of the agreement, Simon & Schuster will make available its entire backlist of thousands of books, including works by authors ranging from Ernest Hemingway to Stephen King.

Today Oyster, the ebook subscription service that launched last year with 100,000 titles, announced that it has topped the 500,000-title mark. "This is the culmination of a lot of content acquisition that we've been doing over the last six months," says co-founder and CEO Eric Stromberg. Among those acquisitions are John Wiley & Son's For Dummies series, McSweeney's Time Out Guides, and Chronicle's Grumpy Cat and Boo. All three publishers are new to Oyster.

Oyster, the New York-based startup that aims to be the Netflix for ebooks, has added about 100 titles from Disney Publishing to its service and is rolling out a new children's vertical Wednesday.

Oyster, which launched last September, charges $9.95 per month for unlimited access to a library of over 100,000 in-copyright ebooks and has iPhone and iPad apps. (The company hasn't publicly updated that 100,000 figure since launch.) Android apps are slated for later this year.

How the Netflix of Books Won Over the Publishing Industry (Cnet) Oyster has grown its library of books available to its all-you-can-eat subscribers to more than 100,000 titles. CEO Eric Stromberg told CNET how it happened, and how the company is changing the world of reading. *** Slashed Budgets Mean Libraries Need Digital Lending More [...]

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