Once in a while a new idea comes along that you just know is going to make an impact. I’m predicting Oyster is just such an idea, and not just because its founders recently grabbed a cool $3 million in funding. So, what can it mean for author marketing?

As Gigaom.com reported on Oct. 10, “While Amazon launched its own lending library on top of its Amazon Prime service, there’s still an opportunity for other competitors to create a Spotify or Netflix for books. That’s the hope of New York City-based Oyster, a new startup which announced today it has raised $3 million led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.”

The idea is to offer up an iPhone app that will give readers unlimited access to a library of books — where you can read as many as you want for a single monthly subscription price.

According to Oyster’s founders, “At Oyster, we think deeply about the future of long-form narrative… When you pay once each month and can read as many books as you’d like, you think about what to read, not what to buy. The distinction is subtle, but important… Today, book buying is centered around transaction, not purely on finding great books. Transaction is important, because authors deserve to be paid for their works. But authors also deserve to have their books treated in a way that reflects the care they put into their writing.”

So two key parts of the business model are based around access and discoverability. But the third prong strikes a chord, too, and that’s offering up a product truly geared for the mobile reader, something forward-thinking agents, authors and marketers are keen to see make a real impact. Says Oyster, “…today’s book reading products were never envisioned with phones in mind— they are incomplete and shrunken copies of their tablet counterparts. We’re building Oyster as an end-to-end product created specifically for mobile… ”

The Founding Team (picture above) includes Duke grad Eric Stromberg, who worked on business development and product at Hunch, acquired by eBay in 2011; Duke grad Andrew Brown, who previously worked at Google on ad selection and optimization for DoubleClick for Publishers, the world’s largest display ad serving system; and Rhode Island School of Design grad Willem Van Lancker, most recently a User Experience Designer for Google Maps. Two years earlier, he worked at IDEO, advising corporations on how to integrate design and creativity into their processes and cultures. His first formal foray into interaction design was at Apple where he designed products and visual design for the iPad, iPhone, and OSX.

To learn more and sign up for an early invitation to be part of the Oyster community, visit http://www.readoyster.com/. Do you think there’s a better future for your book in mobile reading? Share your thoughts!