Medium is acquiring Glose, a digital platform for buying, reading, and discussing books; Glose's 20 employees, most of whom are based in Paris, will join Medium
Glose's 20 employees, most of whom are based in Paris, will join Medium — Glose CEO will become VP books at Medium — Financial terms not disclosed via @kerrymflynn https://www.cnn.com/... Katherine Champagne / @keccers : 👀 could this light a fire under goodreads or does Amazon truly not give an f about that platform https://twitter.com/... @alex : re: the CNN piece on Medium, has any indie writer had M and Substack kinda bid for their custom? https://www.cnn.com/... @kerrymflynn : NEWS: @Medium is acquiring Glose, a digital platform for buying, reading and discussing books. I spoke with @ev and Glose CEO @NicoPrincen, who will now be vp of books at Medium, about the deal. I also chatted with @susanorlean about why she uses Medium https://www.cnn.com/... See also Mediagazer
CNNKerry Flynn
Context & Ripple Effects
This deal fits a long-running pattern at Medium: small tuck-in acquisitions that add a capability rather than an audience, following the earlier buys of RSS infrastructure maker Superfeedr and rich-media platform Embedly. What is different here is ambition — books are a new surface for a company whose history, per the Nieman Lab timeline, has been one of repeated strategic resets.
The timing matters in hindsight: founder Ev Williams was still CEO when Glose joined, and he has since handed the company to Tony Stubblebine, who told Semafor Medium expected to turn a profit in 2024. The Glose team, retained intact with its CEO running books, is one of the few acquisitions from that era still visible in the structure.
First-order effects
Medium gains a working consumer product for buying, reading, and discussing books overnight, with Glose CEO Nico Princen installed as VP of books rather than absorbed anonymously.
Twenty employees, mostly in Paris, join Medium directly — a rare case of the acquirer keeping a European team whole instead of consolidating to US headquarters.
Second-order effects
Amazon's Goodreads, long criticized as neglected, faces its first well-funded challenger built specifically around social reading — the reaction captured in the CNN piece asks outright whether the deal lights a fire under it.
Indie writers gain a second negotiating counterweight to Substack, since a platform that can carry them from article to book weakens the newsletter model's hold on their distribution.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, writing platforms stop being article hosts and become full lifecycle publishers — drafting, audience-building, book sales, and reader community inside one subscription relationship.
Social reading splits from retail: if Goodreads stays static while Medium invests, the discussion layer of books may decouple from Amazon's storefront, forcing competitors to decide whether reading communities are a moat or a cost center.
The trend: Creator-writing platforms are expanding upstream from articles into books, turning reading communities and publishing into part of a single subscription stack.
My main takeaway from this is that Substack is already distributing more money to writers after three years than Medium is after 9. https://www.cnn.com/...
2 things: 1. This lede is a brutal burn of Medium lol, way to frame them as has-been. 2. 100% the opening salvo of an ad play. 1st you get the connection to books, then you get strong user preferences via well-defined book metadata, finally you use the user data to sell stuff. ht…
Medium acquired a French digital book platform, made their CEO VP Books. The French were backed by Kima, Expon and angels, raised about 3 mil https://www.cnn.com/...
I met with @ev to discuss @Readmill and how books/annotations could work with @medium back in 2013. Excited that they finally made an acquisition in the space! Congrats to team Glose! https://twitter.com/...
Proud to be owned by @Medium and excited to see this news. If you don't subscribe yet, it's only $5/month, y'all. You get your fav local pub (US!) + thousands of other pubs and content from writers around the world. https://twitter.com/...
.@Medium once asked me to put one of my blog posts in their publication. They pay me 8 cents for it every couple months no joke https://www.cnn.com/...
Exciting day at work today! “If I'm reading a book and some particular passage speaks to me, I can very seamlessly take that to my blog, maybe write about it, maybe have a discussion about it.” https://www.cnn.com/...
.@Medium is acquiring @Glose, a digital platform for books — Glose's 20 employees, most of whom are based in Paris, will join Medium — Glose CEO will become VP books at Medium — Financial terms not disclosed via @kerrymflynn https://www.cnn.com/...
NEWS: @Medium is acquiring Glose, a digital platform for buying, reading and discussing books. I spoke with @ev and Glose CEO @NicoPrincen, who will now be vp of books at Medium, about the deal. I also chatted with @susanorlean about why she uses Medium https://www.cnn.com/...