New "Spotify for eBooks" Launches in Spain
There has been an explosion in ebook subscription services over the past year, with new services launching in the US, Denmark, Brazil, and Denmark (there are 2 competing services in that one small country).
And now a new service has launched in Spain. It hasn’t gotten much attention in the English-language media but a new ebook subscription service launched last month in Spain.
Nubico is a collaboration between the Bertelsmann publishing conglomerate, the Spanish publisher Planeta, and Telefonica. It launched with around 3,000 titles, most of which came from Planeta.
Subscribers pay 8.99 euros per month for access to up to 5 titles at a time, and there is also an additional charge of .99 to 3.99 euros in order to read certain front-list titles. According to press reports the ebooks can be read on Nubico’s apps for Android, iPad, and iPhone as well as on your PC or ereader. The ebooks are encumbered with Adobe DE DRM, though it is not clear exactly how Nubico enforces the removal of ebooks from the ereaders (expiration, perhaps).
I am reporting on this story second-hand and am working from a number of Spanish-language news stories, so there are details I cannot verify. Unfortunately, the Nubico website has been unavailable whenever I checked over the past several days so I have been unable to confirm details, a detail which should concern anyone looking to sign up.
Nubico is Bertelsmann’s second ebook subscription effort, following the early 2012 launch of Skoobe in Germany. There’s no word on the number of subscribers Skoobe has, but I do know that they have a catalog with 25,000 titles.
That is a far smaller selection than offered by the Kindle owner’s lending library, Oyster (US-only), or Scribd (globally), but it is also a larger selection than the Madrid-based 24Symbols.
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