Oyster shuts down; exec team heads to Google

IN PHOTO: An employee walks past the logo of Google in front of its former headquarters, in Beijing June 2, 2011. Hackers who broke into Google's Gmail system had access to some accounts for many months and could have been planning a more serious attack, said the cyber-security expert who first publicly revealed the incident. Picture taken June 2, 2011. Reuters/Jason Lee

E-book subscription service Oyster is shutting down in the next few months and most of its executive team are on their way to Google.

Oyster hinted in a blog post on Monday it’s “taking steps to sunset” the company’s service, which launched only two years ago. It also informed existing subscribers who want refunds to reach them via email.

The Netflix-like book subscription service explained it was shutting down hinges on the decision to pursue its mobile reading dream by taking “new opportunities”. Google confirmed this new opportunity when it told Recode that part of Oyster’s executive staff is heading to its Playbook Division.

Oyster’s CEO Eric Stromberg and co-founders Andrew Brown and Willem Van Lancker are part of the executive teams jumping to Google. The soon-to-shut-down startup raised $17 million from investors, some of which want to hire some of Oyster’s staff, reported CrunchBase.

Oyster’s main competition was Scribd, which was launched in September 2013. The entry of Amazon’s own e-book subscription, Kindle, in July 2014 made competition a lot tougher.

Oyster’s e-book sales have continued to drop, according to a recent report by Publishers Weekly. Its sales fell every month for the first five months of 2015. Adult ebook sales were down by 3.2 percent while young adult ebook sales plunged 43.3 percent.

Mashable reported that Oyster’s staff is expected to assist Google book’s team in New York in competing with Amazon and Apple by improving curation and design. Google, however, hasn’t confirmed it’s pursuing an e-book subscription service, which the Oyster staff has mastered.

With Oyster’s farewell, the two e-book services left in the U.S. are Scribd and Amazon’s Kindle. However, Scribd also recently made cutbacks to its service.