Entitle Takes a Different Approach to Netflix-for-E-Books Market

What's This?

By Seth Fiegerman2013-12-16 15:00:22 UTC

On paper, Bryan Batten doesn't sound like the kind of person who would help the publishing industry re-imagine its future in digital. He spent most of his career working in the pharmaceutical industry handling sales and contracts. He has virtually no technology expertise. And he lives in Wilmington, N.C., nearly 600 miles south of the country's publishing capital, New York.

While traveling for his pharmaceutical job, however, Batten found himself with time to read and read a lot. In mid-2011, tired of lugging around print editions, he searched for a good e-book subscription or rental option so he could sample more books on the go. No such service existed in the United States, as far as he could tell. That's when he got the idea to create his own, despite the obvious fact that he didn't have the right background for it.

See also: Oyster Releases the First True Netflix-for-E-books App

"I learned quick and tried to absorb as much as I can," Batten, now 30, told Mashable in an interview earlier this month. He spent the better part of the next year pitching publishers and laying the groundwork for a new company. After getting "some positive reception from publishers," he quit his day job and began staffing up with people who had more tech savvy than him.

The end result is Entitle, an e-book subscription service that launched out of beta Monday. Rather than offer access to unlimited e-books each month in the same way that one gets access to movies and TV shows on Netflix, the startup lets users rent two, three or four books a month for a fixed price. Readers can then keep those books on their device indefinitely, regardless of whether they choose to stick with the service afterward.

"We're more similar to Netflix in its DVD days than Netflix in its streaming days," Batten said. "Almost a hybrid of a Netflix model with a book-of-the-month model."

There must have been something in the water at the time Batten came up with his idea because others were working on alternative e-book subscription options. Oyster, a startup based in New York and staffed with tech industry veterans, made headlines in late 2012 when it announced raising $3 million for an unlimited e-book subscription service. Shortly after Oyster launched the following year, Scribd, the popular document-sharing service, unveiled a similar unlimited e-book subscription feature.

Around the same time Oyster launched, Batten's startup quietly opened in private beta under the name eReatah — a lousy name that Batten admits was part of an effort to make up unusual, animal-themed words that might help with "name recognition." Behind the branding, however, was something far more promising: Batten had signed up nearly a dozen publishers including Simon & Schuster, one of the Big 5, to ditch the unlimited subscription model in favor a tiered pricing approach.

After signing up about 150 users for the private beta period, eReatah rebranded as Entitle and expanded its list of publishing partners. It now includes two of the Big 5 publisher — Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins — making Entitle the first e-book subscription service with more than one. (Oyster and Scribd both partner with HarperCollins. All three services say they offer more than 100,000 titles.) Batten says the startup is also close to signing up a third of the BIg 5 publishers, though he declined to say which.

"Publishers are really apprehensive about getting into this all-you-can-eat model," he says, explaining why he thinks his startup has had more success in signing up bigger publishers to date. "As I've been making this pitch to publishers, their argument is they don't want to devalue the content."

Entitle's subscription plans start at $14.99 for two books a month, followed by $21.99 for three books a month and $27.99 for four books. At the low end, subscribers essentially get to read and keep an e-book for $7.50, less than the $9.99 or $12.99 price you'll see on many new e-books. The partnerships with the big publishers means that there are plenty of big name authors here including Jodi Picoult, Stephen King, Walter Isaacson and Michael Crichton.

At launch, Entitle is available on most major platforms, including iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire and Nook.

Entitle raised $5.3 million in a Series A round of funding, a mix of equity and convertible debt, from a single unnamed angel investor. The startup now has about 10 people on staff, including one based in New York.

Batten, for his part, now travels between North Carolina and New York two to three times each month. At least now when he travels, he has more than enough e-book subscription services to choose from.

Image: Entitle

Topics: apps, Business, ebooks, netflix, Startups