Oyster, one of the best-known ebook subscription services, is to close, highlighting the difficulties facing start-ups in the publishing sector. 

Oyster’s business model was similar to that of Netflix and Spotify — charging users $9.95 a month for unlimited access to more than 1m ebooks. It raised $17m in venture financing since 2012, and said it wanted to be the “Amazon of the next 10 years”. 

However, publishers have been reluctant to make their best-selling titles available on subscription platforms, calculating that the most loyal readers would pay less. Oyster had also faced competition from Amazon, which last July launched its own ebook subscription service, Kindle Unlimited. 

Oyster “will be taking steps to sunset the existing Oyster service over the next several months,” the company said in a blogpost. It said it had “made incredible progress” towards the goal of “a better way to read on mobile”. “We believe more than ever that the phone will be the primary reading device globally over the next decade,” the blog said. 

Oyster’s key staff, including chief executive Eric Stromberg, will join Google, industry website Re/code reported. It is unclear whether that forms part of a bigger publishing push by the search company. 

The move comes after the growth in ebooks has begun to plateau in key markets. “This is not a straightforward digital switchover,” wrote analysts at Enders in a recent report on the UK market. “In books what we’re seeing is a split in the market, where some genres and behaviours quickly transition to digital while others remain largely unaffected. In both cases the share of sales on ebook have largely stabilised.” 

However, Enders added that the publishing sector needed to address the decline in the time that people are spending reading books. “It is impossible to overstate how important it is that the industry innovates vigorously in the next two to three years,” it said. 

Remaining ebook subscription platforms include Kindle Unlimited and Scribd. Kindle Unlimited charges $9.99 a month for access to 1m ebooks and thousands of audiobooks. Scribd, which also contains a catalogue of user-uploaded documents, charges $8.99 a month for its service.