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.
Comments
Jussi Keinonen October 21, 2013 um 12:15 pm
Here’s one more for your collection:
http://www.luekirja.fi/kirjasto/
This is run by the biggest Finnish publisher, Otava, and currently has only their own books available. 24,95 euros per month.
Nate Hoffelder October 21, 2013 um 2:34 pm
Thanks!
Ana October 21, 2013 um 5:44 pm
When I checked Nubico’s catalog some weeks ago, I didn’t find they had a much larger catalog than 24symbols, I thought it was more or less the same catalog. I can be wrong, because I only checked for some titles.
They may get some customers, having Telefonica (our main t elecommunications company) and Planeta, the biggest spanish publisher, behind this company, but 9€ a month is a big fee, considering 10 is the standard price for paperbacks, (and you can get old titles even cheaper). Avid readers of more than a book a month might find their catalog lacking, less avid readers, will decide its not worth for them.
Skoobe Expands Into Spain – The Digital Reader October 28, 2014 um 9:51 pm
[…] conglomerates. Bertelsmann also owns Nubico, a subscription ebook service which launched in Spain in October 2013. As of July, Nubico had around 7,000 titles in its catalog. It charges 9 euros per month and also […]