- Glose is a Paris-based social digital book site.
- Post integration, Medium will have more than 1.5m books.
- The acquisition details aren’t made public yet.
Medium announced its purchase of Glose. Glose is a social-based ebook company. It is a forum where users can purchase and read books, then exchange notes with friends and highlights. A Paris, France-based social digital book site, Glose, was founded in 2014. It reaches over one million readers in 200 countries. The company holds ebooks and audiobooks from all major editors. These include Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster, with a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction.
Medium CEO Ev Williams made the announcement in a press release. He said the organization “looks forward to working with the Glose team on partnering with publishers to help authors reach more readers.” However, Glose’s library isn’t included in Medium’s $5 monthly and $50 annual subscriptions.
It is still a little vague what the Glose-Medium integration would actually look like. Glose CEO Nicolas Princen raises the idea of readers being able to leap into a book from a post. He says, ‘The vision is to construct an environment where you can go from one to another. 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.
The Road Ahead:
A Glose-Medium integration could go about this in a variety of ways. This way Medium would be able to show books written by the author of the article you’re reading. Going further, Medium was also able to find books on the subject of the article and show those to readers who want to go deeper. Medium sponsors a broad variety of articles, from brief blog posts to in-depth investigative journalism, and all in between. Medium will have more than 1.5 million books available inside its vibrant ecosystem with the integration of Glose. Readers will be able to learn more of what an author or a topic is searching for, and authors can all have their various types of content in one position, raising their voice and viewpoint.
Medium didn’t disclose the acquisition cost yet to the public. However, outside of its subscription service, it provides a revenue source for the company. Although convincing people to pay to read shorter-form articles could be a challenge. While Medium prefers to integrate with Glose, the company wants to be a tremendous force in online reading.
