All the books you’ll ever need on Bookmate? Not quite (REVIEW)

Being a reader with a voracious appetite, I’ve looked to the West and their slate of ebook subscription services with envy for some time now. Then just last week, I was extremely excited to learn that Singapore was finally going to be home to a Russia-based social reading service called Bookmate. Additionally, as a subscriber of local telco StarHub, I would be eligible to grab a premium account for just S$14 (US$11) per month – joy upon joy!

Yet I was disappointed when I subscribed, logged on, and found the platform utterly wanting. Ultimately, it failed to deliver on the promise stated on its website:

One subscription fee. All the books you’ll ever need – in 9 languages, including new releases and box fresh business books.

500,000 books?

The first indication that I might be let down came when I perused the homepage, which displayed the top titles in each category – and I couldn’t recognize most of them. A quick Google search indicated that these books were fairly old, some even dating back to the early 2000s. Not a good sign.

You know something is wrong when Justin Bieber’s book is a top hit.

Bookmate claims to have 500,000 titles in its database – which is comparable to similar services offered by Scribd, Oyster, and Amazon, which have between 400,000 to 600,000 books to browse. With this in mind, I had hope that if I did some digging, I would be able to find the titles I wanted to read.

And so, crossing my fingers, I did a search for two of my favorite authors – Stephen King and Chris Guillebeau.

In particular, I really wanted to read Guillebeau’s latest book, The Happiness of Pursuit. No luck. Failing to find that, I thought that at least I’d be able to read Stephen King’s greatest hits.

Found some Stephen King books! However…

…they were unavailable. Sad.

No go there, either – this despite the fact that some people were apparently “reading” them.

35 people reading this book now – not including me.

I tried Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, which was published three months ago. Nothing found.

Even the recently released Peter Thiel bestseller was nowhere to be found.

After attempting to find ten or so recent bestselling titles – such as Hooked: A Guide to Building Habit-Forming Products and Crazy is a Compliment: The power of zigging when everyone else zags – and finding none, I finally chanced upon a book that I’d been wanting to read for a while: Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising by Ryan Holiday, published late last year.

At long last.

Design-wise, the e-reader interface is not too shabby, with various options to change font size and type, page color, and line indentation to suit your personal taste.

Returning to the book after exiting it would bring you directly back to where you left off, which is similar to the bookmark function that Amazon’s Kindle app has, albeit automatic. This trick works across all the devices on which the app is installed.

The social aspect of Bookmate is what differentiates it from other services, and makes it feel like you’re joining a book club. What it does is to allow you to connect with and “follow” friends who are using the same service via Facebook or Twitter. After that, you can keep track of the latest titles they are reading.

Doesn’t it make you feel like you’re part of a book club?

Even this feature wasn’t exempt from flaws. The above image shows that Terence Lee, who is an editor at Tech in Asia, added Red Riding Nineteen Seventy Four to his reading list. However, Lee says that he did no such thing.

While the aesthetic of the web and mobile apps are passable, they pale in comparison to Scribd, Oyster, and Amazon’s, which feel more sleek and elegant. I’d go as far as to say that even Apple’s native iBook app seems prettier than Bookmate does, which is highly unfortunate.

Still, Bookmate will be Singaporean readers’ only option when it comes to ebook subscription services, given that Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, Oyster, and Scribd are all still unavailable in Asia. Alternatively, Singapore’s National Library provides a good selection of ebooks for borrowing and browsing online as well. Hopefully Bookmate will get its act together soon and work towards fulfilling its promise of providing “all the books you’ll ever need.”

We’ve reached out to Bookmate for comment, and will update this as soon as we hear from them.

See: The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age (book review)

This post All the books you’ll ever need on Bookmate? Not quite (REVIEW) appeared first on Tech in Asia.

All the books you’ll ever need on Bookmate? Not quite (REVIEW)