Why do we buy books? Well, until very recently, there were few other ways to get them. We could go to a library, or borrow them from people we knew. Otherwise, we had to buy them. And, until recently, buying them meant buying objects, the sturdy real things, and keeping them somewhere—neatly in bookshelves, dangerously in basements, or resignedly in boxes left unpacked from the last move. E-books made ownership easier but less sure. Hold up your Kindle or your tablet or your smart phone and give it a shake; they’re in there somewhere—or else in the cloud. Technology made some purchases unnecessary; publishers couldn’t squeeze us for Milton or Dickens anymore since they’re available for free online. The Kindle has a lending program, with which you can let someone borrow one of your books for fourteen days (hurry along, borrowers of “War and Peace”). But mostly, and unlike with music or movies or digital journalism, to consume books we still buy them and then get to keep them.

The founders of Oyster, a handsomely designed new app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, are hoping that people are looking for a new way to get access to books. The app, which takes its name from a line in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (“the world’s mine oyster,” spoken, incidentally, by a thief), currently gives users access to more than a hundred thousand titles for a monthly fee of just under ten bucks. (Netflix for books, as it’s been called.) Users tap a book to read it instantly, and can store up to ten downloads at a time to read offline. Oyster also offers recommendations based on previous selections, and allows users to share what they’ve been reading on social media. (You can also turn off the social features and read privately.) Right now you need an invitation to join, but Oyster will be expanding both how many people can use it and the number of available books, and the founders say that they plan to release a version for iPad later this fall.

Since it doesn’t require individual purchases, Oyster encourages browsing. As with Netflix’s Watch Instantly service, chances are good that on Oyster you won’t find the exact book you’ve been wanting to read—but you will be steered toward others that you’d considered and forgotten in the past, or something new that catches your eye. (Oyster’s current recommendation algorithm still needs a little tweaking; many of the “related” books that accompany James Salter’s “A Sport and a Pastime,” for instance, are about baseball.) The service is less useful for readers who aren’t looking for recommendations and who know exactly what they want to read. For now, most of the thousands of books in their library are older, backlist titles. Oyster currently has deals with HarperCollins and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, among others, but it will be interesting to see if, and how quickly, other major houses sign on. If this new model gains wide acceptance, either through Oyster or whatever follows on its heels, it will raise big business questions for the industry. The most pressing: What will happen to publishers and, especially, writers, if sales get replaced by what are, in effect, streams? And what might happen to local libraries, many of which already face declining use and strained budgets?

Meanwhile, a few notes on the reading experience. Until a tablet version is available, the first question for some potential users is whether they want to read a book on the small screen of a smartphone. Oyster’s founders have played up what could be seen as a limitation, emphasizing that the app encourages reading in the minor moments of life that we normally give over to fiddling idly on our mobile phones. Night readers, and especially co-sleepers, are likely to approve—a glowing phone held a few inches from your face becomes both the book and the flashlight of those late-night reading adventures from childhood, and leaves one’s companion undisturbed. The interface itself is thoughtfully designed—browsing is simple, the five typeface options are each appealing. Unlike with Apple’s iBooks app, which serves as a bridge between paper and digital reading by animating the turning of pages, Oyster uses a straightforward and more modern up/down scroll method. One feature, which is both clever and a little unsettling: at the bottom of the page, along with noting the number of pages remaining in a chapter, it will offer an estimate about how many minutes you have to go.

There are, however, areas that need improvement: the table of contents in many books are rather haphazardly arranged; there is no way to scroll quickly through a book with the side slider, meaning that you have to go back to the table of contents to jump ahead; and most frustrating, there’s no way to mark up a text by highlighting, dropping bookmarks, or composing notes.

This last complaint raises a more fundamental question about what Oyster is, and circles back to the notion of why we own books in the first place. When we borrow books, we’re expected to return them in the condition we received them. It would be rude to mark up your friend’s book with a pen, and basically illegal to do it to a library book. If Oyster is more like a lender than a seller, we shouldn’t expect to have complete ownership over the books we read on it.

But this kind of interaction with a book, jumping in and out without leaving a mark, feels rather fleeting. One of the reasons that we spend the money to own a book, then, is that we get to do whatever we want with it. The 1972 revision of Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book,” written with Charles Van Doren (of quiz-show infamy), lays out a rousing case for a kind of rough and thorough possession of what we read:

When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.

All e-book reading feels a little disconnected to the habitual pen-in-hand reader, but some kind of digital marker, at least, gives a user fixed points of reference, a few colorful buoys in what would otherwise be a uniformly blank sea of words. It is hard enough to recall the particulars of books as it is, and reading without an aid to memory, for me at least, makes for an anxious experience. For now, Oyster may simply be a reminder that there is no single right way to consume books in this age of many options—it seems very likely that a hybrid model of print, e-books, and “streamed” books will serve most readers for years to come.

Photograph by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP.
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