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24symbols, with a 100,000 strong title catalogue in Spanish,English, Italian and French, and claiming 500,000 readersworldwide, focuses on the reading experiences, bystating: “Read whatever you want, wherever you want, andhowever you want.”At the core stands the service’s cooperation agreementswith international telecommunications companies, andwith Zed, a provider of mobile digital content and entertainment,with huge expertise in exploiting digital userdata. Zed, founded in 1996 in Spain, and operating in 60countries worldwide, including Europe, India and China,has acquired a 32% stake of 24symbols in May 2013.24symbols has launched its services so far in Russia,through a cooperation with Beeline, the country’s largesttelephone operator, and in Guatemala, with Tigo, a brandof Millicom International Cellular, a Swedish Americanventure, founded in 1990, which is offering various digitaland telecommunications services in 15 developing countriesin Latin America, Africa and Asia.Nubico, started in September 2013, is coowned by SpanishCirculo de Lectores - a 50:50 joint venture between Germany’smedia giant Bertelsmann and the largest Spanishtrade publishing company Planeta -, together with thehuge telecommunications company Telefonica.With a so far limited catalogue of 5,100 titles (from initially3,000), Nubico is offering a subscription at €5.99(downfrom €8.99 at launch), and aims at owning 30% of theSpanish ebook market by 2015, which can be achievedonly by expanding successfully into major Lantin Americanmarkets, notably Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru andArgentina.Obviously, Amazon’s Prime service needs also be looked atin the context of subscription services. Priced at an annualfee of $99 (up from initially $79) in the US, and recentlylaunched in several international markets, including Germany(at €49), the offer bundles content of vrious type,notably streaming video and lending of ebooks, yet of alimited, managed catalogue of titles only, plus premiumdelivery of physical purchases.The differences between the various approaches are significanton several levels, but also do they share some keysimilarities in their strategic choices:• The ventures include typical startups (Oyster), jointventures of players from traditional publishing(Skoobe) as well as novel consortia of content withcomunication networks (24symboles, Nubico).• The catalogues offered to subscribers are partly curatedselections of ebooks (Skoobe, Nubico), huge librarieswith a lot of selfpublished literature next tobestsellers (Scribd), or even cross-media packages,merging ebooks with movies or any content that isavailable in digital formats through mobile networks(24symbols, Amazon Prime).• Fees are typically low, at around $10 or €10 per month,or even less, making it obviously challenging for publishers(and even more so, authors) to earn revenuesat similar levels as in print, which has spurned controversyalready, for music, at the remuneration modelof Spotify.Together, all these new platforms have also strong commoncharacteristics and goals:• They aim at owning a new, premium channel to customers(be they readers, or users of any type of digitalmobile content), as well as all the valuable informationabout these customers.• If any of these platforms will succeed, they will be ina similar ambivalent relationship with traditional publishers,as Amazon is today, as they have the potentialto become a key sales conduit for the publishers onthe one hand, while aggressively competing with thepublishers through their ownership of the end user,and their influence on pricing and revenues.The development is far too novel for any real assessmentof its future impact, but its potential to re-define some keyelement along the value chain of books and reading, fromthe business model to the relationship with the customer,is huge.(Javier Celaya contributed to this section.)The Global eBook Report 112