Oyster App Review: Personal Finance and Investing Books

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oysterssWouldn’t a Netflix for books be neat? You could borrow all the books that you wanted to read and then return them when you’re done. Oh wait, they already invented it and called it a library.

But seriously, what if you wanted it all available 24/7 on your iPhone or iPad, and you don’t want to wait if someone else has checked it out already. Enter the new eBook subscription app Oyster. For $10 a month (first month free, iPhone/iPad + Android app added as of 6/17/14) they’ll let you read all the books you want from their catalog of 500,000+ books. That sounds good me as I buy about a book per month on Amazon as it is. The question is if Oyster’s library is big enough for my personal reading habits. I couldn’t find a way to search through their entire collection without an active subscription, so I signed up for a trial (credit card required).

As I mainly read business, personal improvement, and personal finance books these days, that is going to be the focus of my review. I decided to compile a list of notable books that I have read or want to read first, and then check Oyster to see if they have it in their library.

William Bernstein’s Recommended Reading List for Young Investors

5 Recent Bestsellers

5 Personal Favorite Financial Books

Conclusion

Oyster has been steadily increasing the publishers participating in their service, but it looks like they still have a way to go. They do have a pretty good showing in older, popular, well-reviewed books. The problem is that these are exactly the type of books that are readily available in most libraries. On the other hand, they are weak in recent business bestsellers, which is where they could provide me with the most value and convenience (I’d like to just browse and skim many of these first). I read that they will not have it if the book was released within the last 3 months. They also don’t have enough depth to carry some of the better books in the early retirement niche.

I won’t be paying $10 a month for this as I only read about a book a month (cost $10-$15) and Oyster probably won’t have it in their library. I will note that on a user-experience basis, actually reading the books and navigating around the app has been pretty easy.

Alternatives to Oyster include Scribd and the Amazon Kindle Lending Library which boasts 350,000+ titles. The latter is free if you already have both a Kindle (any model) and an Amazon Prime subscription.

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Comments

  1. What happened to Amazon Prime Lending Library benefits?

    • I’m not sure what you mean… I touched on them at the end of my review. Based on a brief search their own Business and Investing catalog is worse than Oyster’s. Most of it is filled with self-published eBooks that few people have ever heard of.

  2. Do they let you take out many books at a time? Im travelling in a bit and was thinking it may be worthwile to load up 5-6 books to make sure one of them I’m into on the long plane ride.

  3. Yes you can read multiple books at a time with Oyster. You can download the books for offline use, although the app only keeps the last 10 books.

  4. Gary Marcos says

    Hi,
    Another option which I make use of is to listen to audio books from my local library. Check out the book, import and download to your listening device. I find the audio books to be perfect for hikes, the gym, airplanes and so on. And you can’t beat the price if you get it from your library.

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