Spanish Start-Up To Launch “Spotify For Books”

by: David Roman

A Spanish company is hoping to do to books what Spotify has done for music; give readers access to a library of content to be streamed to their computer or mobile.

24symbols, a Spanish start-up created all of nine months ago, is online in beta mode since March 31, with 10,000 testers that have signed up to check out some books, mostly novels.

The website combines freemium content—allowing users to read and browse books for free, as long as they put up with ads, or pay for ad-less reading—with a cloud-only model. It involves no downloads of titles into reading devices of any kind, but allows reading, via the website, through a variety of devices. The paid-for model is provisionally priced at €9,99 a month, €19,99 for three months or €59,99 euro for a full year.

24symbols is launching, reportedly in June, first with a majority of Spanish-language books, but aims to move into English-language books in a matter of months, with other languages like French, German or Italian waiting in the wings if everything goes right.

Founder and CEO Aitor Grandes said 24symbols is a bit like Sweden’s Spotify—a website, popular in western Europe, that streams music, with no downloads, under a freemium system—but for books.

For a U.S. audience, he says it would best compared to what Netflix does for video, or Pandora Radio does for music.

As in the case of Copia, a U.S.-based rival launched last year, 24symbols bows with reverence to the almighty power of social networks, and encourages users to share, recommend and discuss books via Facebook.

The absence of downloads is a key difference, though. Sol Rosenberg, a vice-president at Copia, says cloud-only reading is not yet available in their service but coming soon as publishers having balked at the possibility at first, have now relaxed their stance.

24symbols, meanwhile, is all about the cloud, and is betting that publishers will see this as the lesser evil, compared with the Copia model, mostly based around downloaded, heavily-protected Adobe files.

In theory a streaming model will allow publishers and even authors access to information about readers behavior at a previously unseen level, even down to the page. If readers all give up a reading a book at a certain point then publishers and authors can see what the problem is and use that to change future titles.

from: Wall Street Journal