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Goodreads, launched by Otis Chandler in January 2007,and acquired by Amazon in March 2013, is clearly the biggestlocation in cyberspace for readers to exchange views,reviewing books, and making, or breaking, the career ofauthors and their works. By early 2014, Goodreads claimsto have 25 million members, who have added 750 millionbooks and contributed 29 million reviews. Amazon alsoowns Shelfari, and controls a stake in LibraryThing.Even one year earlier, in 2006, the Holtzbrinck publishinggroup had started a similar reading community in Germany,Lovelybooks.Also, a growing number of leading publishing houses havelaunched readers’ portals and community websites, eitheralong the company brand, or along genres (like crime, orfantasy, or romance), aiming at closing the gap betweentheir editorial offer, and the readers. But these initiatives,important, and challenging to handle, as they might be forpublishers in their attemp to reach out directly to theircustomers, do not touch on the traditional business modelof the book industry, of bringing to the attention of thecustomer, and selling to him, one book, at a price set peritem, at a time.In 2013, a new shortcut had poped up, as analysts askedwhether a Spotify or Netflix type of model might be applicableto books, and not just to listening to music or watchingTV programs on demand.The idea of combining a community of readers with a subscription(or lending, or streaming) service for booksopened an entirely new dimension, as the approach combinestwo aspects of strategic, or even disruptive potential:To organize the complete value chain, or ecosystem, ofauthor, books and reading from the reader’s angle - andnot from that of the author or the distributor, and by doingso, to produce massive amounts of data about readers’ usageof the books, and their discussions and exchangesaround those activities. And to replace the old businessmodel by a subscription, through an all you can read flatrate.The ebooks are reading you, ran a headline in the New YorkTimes, published on Christmas day 2013, introducing severalUS based startups that had engaged in a race for whatwas seen as possibly the next new thing in ebooks anddigital book distribution. (As New Services Track Habits, theE-Books Are Reading You. The New York Times, 24 December2013). Similar initiatives have sprung up simultaneously ina number of countries.In the US, the New York based company Oyster is offering“unlimited access to over 200,000 books for $9.95 a month,with new titles added all the time” (company statement),after raising $14 million in investment capital. (PublishersWeekly, 14 January 2014).Entitle, initially branded as eReatah, of North Carolina, triesout a different aproach, which is closer to a traditional bookclub.In Germany, Readify has started a beta launch in February2014, after rasing half a million euros in a crowd fundingcampaign, which included 1363 users who agreed to contribute€5 each. The service will cater only to smartphonesand tablets, not to eInk devices.Youboox, in France, has started in 2012, with a catalogueof 7,000 titles, including graphic novels (or bandes dessinées)at €9.95 per month.Not all platforms that are busying readers and analysts byconnecting readers and books, while harvesting data, arenecessarily new companies.With Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck, the two largest publishinggroups in Germany have joined forces in a jointventure to launch an online lending and subscription platformin spring 2012, branded Skoobe, offering some30,000 titles at a monthly subscription fee between €9.99and €19.99, depending on the scope of the access.Scribd is a service which had allowed users to uploaddocuments of various length and size since 2007 already,building a user base of 80 million monthly readers. Recently,Scribd has switched its branding to defining theplatform as a “personal digital library, where you have unlimitedaccess to the world’s largest collection of e-booksand written works”, offering not just user generated content,but also “over 300,000 books from over 900 publishers,including New York Times bestsellers, literary classics,groundbreaking non-fiction, and reader favorites in everygenre” to premium subscribers.Before repositioning itself in that way, Scribd had beencritically viewed by anti-piracy activists due to a not alwaysclear policy with regard to copyright in the content uploadedby user. Today, Scribd affirms that it does “not toleratecopyright infringement.”Remarkably, two ventures with an entirely different cloutand backing have formed in Spain, branded 24symbols andNubico respectively. Both ventures are combining contentwith the network capacity and customer base of telecommunicationsgiants.111 The Global eBook Report