Oyster’s new ebook store will let you buy many titles you can’t find in your subscription

By Malarie Gokey April 8, 2015

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An Oyster ebook subscription may include access to more than one million titles, but there are still some ebooks that you can’t find on the service. Previously, if you were looking for a book and it wasn’t available on Oyster, you had to jump over to the ebook store at Amazon, Google, Apple, or elsewhere to buy it. Now, Oyster has its own store, so you can buy the titles it doesn’t have without ever leaving the app.

You can also preorder upcoming titles like Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman or Jonathan Franzen’s Purity. The new ebook store includes titles from all of the big five publishers in the U.S., including Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Scholastic, Harlequin, Norton, Chronicle, and other slightly smaller publishers are also included.

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Any ebook you buy from Oyster’s store on the Web or in the Android app will automatically download and sync across all your devices. It’s unclear how this works with iOS devices. To make it easier to distinguish between ebooks that are part of your subscription and those that you’ll have to shell out extra money for. There’s now a toggle and banners to separate paid titles from free ones.

The only foreseeable issue with Oyster’s new store is it’s possible publishers will withhold key titles it knows many people will want to read from the subscription service, so they have to pay for them. It’s unclear how Oyster will strike this balance, but the service would undoubtedly lose business if all the most popular ebooks suddenly disappeared from the subscription side of things.

Oyster also updated a few parts of the app, including the Explore tab, which has 43 new categories. To celebrate the new store, Oyster is giving away three new books: Open City, Becoming Steve Jobs, and The Girl on the Train. If you’re interested, just tag a photo on your Instagram with #whereiread to enter the contest. You can check out the new store here.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

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