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…