Medium announced its purchase of Glose, a social-based ebook firm. Glose is a platform where people can order and read books, then exchange notes and highlights with friends. Medium CEO Ev Williams states in the press release announcing the purchase that the company “looks forward to working with the Glose team on partnering with publishers to help authors reach more readers.” However, as Engadget reports, Glose’s library “will not be included in Medium’s $5 monthly and $50 annual subscriptions” once the integration is complete.
It is also a little unclear what the Glose-Medium integration would really look like. Glose CEO Nicolas Princen, in an interview with CNN Business, raises the possibility of readers being able to leap into a book from an article. He says, “The vision is to create an experience where you can go from one to the next, you can read an article and then buy a book that connects to that content with only one click if you want to go deeper.”
A Glose-Medium integration could go in a variety of ways. I would like to think the Medium would be able to show me books written by the writer in the article I’m reading. Moving on, Medium was also able to find books on the subject of the article and present them to readers who want to go deeper.
Ev Williams also spoke with CNN Business on making it easy to spin a blog post from Glose’s inspiring book passage “If I’m reading a book and some particular passage speaks to me, I can very seamlessly take that to my blog, maybe write about it, maybe have a discussion about it.”
Although Medium’s acquisition cost is not public, outside of its subscription programme, it creates a revenue source for the company. Although getting people to pay to read shorter-form papers can be a challenge, many people are still used to paying for books.
One thing is obvious, though Medium prefers to merge with Glose, the company wants to be a monumental force in online reading, and it has just added 1.5 million books to its library.