Yesterday a very popular purchase was made public within the world of ebooks that was formalized at the beginning of the month and that will change the landscape of flat rates for ebooks as we know it.
The Spanish ebook service, Nubic, which belongs to Telefonica and they worked with Grupo Planeta to offer the service, has been sold to the Swedish company Nextory, a service of ebooks and audioebooks that through this purchase will reach Spain.
This purchase will not affect Nubico users as the service will continue and the ebook catalog will continue to be maintained since Movistar and the Grupo Planeta continues to maintain agreements with Nextory to spread the titles of Planet.
Thus, Nextory plans to land in Spain permanently before the end of the year and with it a catalog of nearly 600.000 titles, including ebooks and audioebooks.
The purchase price is unknown, but if we visit the official Nextory website we see that the Swedish company received an investment of 2020 million euros at the end of 165 to expand throughout Europe. Since then we have seen that Nextory has reached two more countries (Norway and the Netherlands) and that there are other countries like France or Italy where they are not yet, which makes me think that the purchase price has not been as high as it could be. to be expected, although the agreements with Grupo Planeta would make the purchase price attractive due to the rights that Grupo Planeta will maintain and will continue to deal with Nextory in the future.
Nubico and Nextory, what do these two services currently offer?
The Spanish ebook market is very small and it is true that so far, the only company so far that has incorporated audiobooks has been Amazon, but it seems that before the end of the year this will change.
Nubico is an ebook service via streaming or flat rate ebooks that was born in Spain years ago and that thanks to agreements with Movistar and other companies has managed to reach many Spanish homes. Movistar users had a price reduction or a few more days of trial and non-Movistar users had a shorter trial period.
Nubico has a catalog of more than 60.000 titles in addition to more than 80 Spanish magazines that are digitized and distributed by this service. The price of Nubico is 8,99 euros per month and if you pay months in advance, the price goes down until you save 18 euros per year.
While it is true that we have no news that Nubico was an overwhelming success like other streaming services are, such as Netflix, it was unknown that it was a loss or that it would give Movistar and Grupo Planeta losses.
Nubico's name will be replaced by Nextory before the end of the year
Nextory, the future name of Nubico, is a flat-rate service that in addition to ebooks has audioebooks, used through smartphone app and offers three prices that contain certain characteristics. The Nextory catalog is contains more than 600.000 titles that are distributed between ebooks and audiobooks or audioebooks. During these first months of launch, Nextory will increase the Nubico catalog to 300.000 titles.
Thus, the highest rate that it has to change, is almost 20 euros per month and it would offer us the reproduction of the catalog as many times as we wanted, up to four profiles within the account and the simultaneous use of the platform by those four profiles.
A lower price, around 16 euros, would mean having unlimited access to the catalog and several profiles, but there could only be one profile using the platform, that is, two users could not read at the same time. And finally the third price, the lowest, would be almost 13 euros and it would be for a single profile and would have 30 hours a month to reproduce the catalog. Possibly this is more than enough for one person, but if we want to give access to a family, it seems that the final option, the first, is the most affordable.
Taking into account all this, the differences between Nubico and Nextory are obvious, so the rumors and rumors about the future of Nubico are open since for the moment, the only thing that has been confirmed by the companies is that Nextory will be the final name of the service and that Grupo Planeta and Movistar will continue to have agreements with the Swedish company.
I understand that the difference between the current Nubico and Nextory will disappear in favor of Nubico and that we will have the benefits of Nextory, that is, a service for families and a catalog of audioebooks for a price similar or equal to the current cost of Nubico, but We have to say that at the moment nothing has been officially reported (in addition to what has been discussed) about the changes in the services, on the other hand logical and normal.
In any case, this purchase gradually makes Nextory Expands in Europe and Faces Kindle Unlimited, one of the most used and popular flat rates in the ebook world.
More information.- Official announcement