Dive Brief:

• E-book startup Oyster is expanding its ambitions, and its co-founder told Business Insider that the company wants to be “the Amazon of the next 10 years.”

• While Amazon has dominated the e-book market, which has faltered somewhat thanks to its tussles with book publishers, Oyster has gained a lot of press for being the “Netflix” of e-books with its unlimited reading plan for $9.95 a month. It's also now selling e-books to non-subscribers as well as subscribers.

• Oyster’s superior design and the relationships it’s forged with customers give it a real chance to dominate, its founders say.

Dive Insight:

Amazon first disrupted, then dominated the books market, first in physical books, then e-books. The publishing world seemed dazed for years and years, but seems to be waking up to its own opportunities to take back some territory. 

What Amazon may have taught publishers and startups like Oyster is that the disrupter can also be disrupted. Oyster’s aesthetic and usability top Amazon’s in some ways, including highly user-friendly curation of lists. 

"To date, the e-book retail experience has been about efficiency," cofounder Willem Van Lancker told Business Insider. "There's a search bar on Amazon, and others where you know the book you want and you go and find it. As Amazon thinks about most businesses, it's akin to a warehouse. It's that model of efficiency, but there isn't the beauty, the design, and the discovery. We really built Oyster as a book store."

But perhaps most important, Oyster's relationship with publishers — and Amazon’s burning of those relationships — have smoothed its path. Perhaps as a result, the company offers some 200,000 more titles than Amazon’s own e-book subscription service.  

"Amazon paved the way in e-books," Van Lancker says. "We want to be the Amazon of the next 10 years. We want to build the company that takes e-books into the next wave."