Oyster, the Netflix of e-books, is expanding

Oyster, the e-book subscription service, has launched a new version of its app that is available for Android devices as well as Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook tablets.

The New York City startup has often been described as the Netflix or Spotify of e-books. It launched late last year offering iPhone customers access to more than 100,000 e-books for a $9.95 monthly subscription. Since then, Oyster’s catalog has grown to more than 500,000 titles and it is now available on the iPad as well as the platforms announced today.

Android and Nook users can head to the Google Play digital store to download the app while Kindle Fire users can get Oyster by going to oysterbooks.com/kindlefire.

CEO Eric Stromberg said Oyster’s launch on Android, Kindle Fire and Nook is a big step for the company, which hopes to expand its service to even more devices in the next few months.

“The goal is to make the service available on as many platforms as possible so that any Oyster reader can read their books whenever and wherever they want,” Stromberg said.

Oyster is not the first e-book subscription service to launch on Android. Rival Scribd has been available for both Android and Apple iOS devices for some time now. Scribd costs $8.99 per month and has a catalog of more than 300,000 e-books.

Neither service has disclosed how many subscribers they have, so it’s hard to gauge the impact they’ve had, if any, on e-book retail giants like Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble. However, subscription services have proved effective for other types of media.

With movies and TV shows, Netflix has more than 46 million customer who pay for its online streaming subscription service while music-streaming service Spotify recently announced that it now has more than 10 million customers who pay a monthly subscription.

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