Reading, Lately – with Oyster.

by Sam Tackeff | Nov 2, 2013 | Books

First, here’s dinner tonight. I heated up my cast iron pan with a glug of olive oil and a spoonful of butter. I seasoned some large sea scallops with salt, and pan seared them in the pan, just a few minutes on each side. In a large bowl, I made the salad – baby spinach, an avocado, and a ripe mango. When the scallops were finished, I took them out of the pan, and added a single clove of minced garlic to the pan juices. I cooked the garlic for about 30 seconds, and transferred the juices, oil and butter to a bowl, and added the juice of a lime. I poured in a bit more olive oil and whisked it all together, making this one delicious pan-sauce vinaigrette. The scallops went on the salad, I dressed everything, and tossed gently. Dinner!

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You know how people look back fifty, sixty, seventy years and think “Ahhh, the good old days…now that was the life!” And then smart people realize that that life was fairly terrible back then, and societal norms were actually restricting and oppressive?

Yes, okay.

I was going to make that a metaphor for my reading habits – how years ago I used to read voraciously, except that most of the time I was reading kind of crappy novels, and so my 100+ books a year didn’t actually mean all that much because of a lack of quality reading material. Except, that’s actually a terrible metaphor, because I was reading 100+ books a year, and not wasting the rest of my time with bad habits, so even though those books weren’t all Nabokov, the fact that I was reading more often… well, that made my life better in general.

Right. Books. Let’s talk about them then. For the past two weeks I’ve been trying out a new app called Oyster – which touts itself as the “Netflix for Books” – a reading app for iPhone.

Well, I already use what I’ve thought of as the Netflix for books, which is my multiple public library accounts, which allow me to download hundreds of thousands of e-books and audiobooks on my phone through Overdrive. For free.

But the fact is, Oyster is very pretty, and Overdrive, not so much, so I thought that for the $9.95/month that Oyster is charging it couldn’t hurt try out the service for a bit and see how I liked it. While I’m never going to give up the delights of print, a proper reading experience on the phone is important to me, as I typically always have the device on me, and count on a digital library to entertain me when I can’t have a book in hand.

Set up is fairly easy – download the app – still, I believe, in locked beta – request an invite, get the invite two days later, and then boom, access. They make you choose five books that you’d like to start with – mostly I believe to get you to search through their content, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to bypass this step and start reading.

While there aren’t necessarily NYTimes top best sellers, Oyster has a good selection of literature, non-fiction, and much to my enjoyment, cookbooks! (I actually have this Adam Roberts cookbook, but it’s always nice to be able to pull up a cookbook on your phone while out and about.)

This month on Oyster I’ve read: The Art Forger, by B.A. Shapiro, about art heists, forgery, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum (my favorite museum). And then I read Scott Jurek’s Eat and Run, about his career as an ultra marathoner. I’m almost finished with the Runner’s World “Running on Air” by Budd Coates, a whole book about breathing, which might sound bizarre, but actually I found to be fairly useful.

Now I’m reading Onward, by Howard Schultz about how he re-vitalized Starbucks. I find the book interesting, if somewhat self serving, but I’m only a quarter of the way through.

My main complaints about Oyster are that the books you are reading aren’t all downloaded on your phone, so if you are in a non-service area, or if, say, you are in the middle of your office with low service and your office wi-fi happens to be down, you are not guaranteed to be able to pull up a book to entertain yourself. This certainly saves space on your phone, but limits the usefulness of the app. (Oyster says in the FAQ that they download the last 10 books read onto the phone, but I’ve not been able to pull up books a few times now in this situation. It’s possible that this is a bug in the app, so I’d like to see if this fixes itself in newer builds – additionally they mention the possibility of high data costs of roaming while reading Oyster books abroad, so this makes me curious about how the books are actually being served to the phone vs. being stored.)

At the moment, there is also a limited selection – 100,000 titles, and not all of them full books, although, for $9.95/month, I decided that as long as there are 2-3 books that I want to read per month, it’s a fairly decent value. I suspect that they’ll be getting more additions soon.

The third frustration, and perhaps the most problematic: the cataloguing and search is terrible. This might be by design, but there are limited ways to search, and it’s very hard to search by specific topic. The search bar seems to have a weak algorithm. I’d love to see the ability to search by publisher, and be able to drill down by topic better – or to see most requested books in each category.  I like the idea that each book has a “related” feature, but in reality this feature isn’t all that useful.

For instance, in the screenshot above, you’ll notice a section “Similar to Onward” (the book about the business of Starbucks that I’m currently reading.) While the idea of a “similar to” feature is neat, in practice, you’ll note that two of the books “Fresh Pantry Rhubarb” and “Fresh Pantry Lettuce” aren’t all that similar at all. (Unless there’s a plot twist that I’m not seeing coming – maybe Howard will quit his coffee empire and become a hipster farmer?)

The keyword search feature is similarly frustrating – I expect to be able to search for two word keywords, but when I searched “food memoirs” and “food literature”, this is what I got – despite the fact that there are actually quite a decent amount of both types of books in their selection – you just have to dig and dig for them. It’s sort of a trial and error – to find books, I’ve been clicking the related button many times, and trying to go farther and farther down the wormhole in order to find interesting titles.

If Oyster can improve these three key issues, then I think they’ll have the edge on other reading apps. That said, until I run out of books to read, I’ll be a decently happy paying customer – and hopefully they’ll continue to improve!

Next up on my Oyster reading list: Bill Bryson’s ‘The World at Stage’, Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Spirit of Place’, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, ‘The Widow Cliquot’, Clifford Wright’s ‘Mediterranean Vegetables’ (a cookbook), Steven Sieden’s ‘A Fuller View’ (about Buckminster Fuller), Annie Dillard’s ‘The Writing Life‘, and ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler’ by Italo Calvino. Admittedly, because if there is one feature I love best it is the list making feature, there’s quite a few others that I have added.

What’s on your reading list? Have you tried Oyster?