Medium will expand into books with its latest acquisition

Medium is getting into books. This week, the company announced that it’s acquiring Glose, a platform that’s not all too dissimilar from itself. On the startup’s website and app, you’ll find a place to read, buy and discuss books. And like Medium, you can even highlight passages and share them.

Once the two integrate with one another, you’ll be able to access more than 1.5 million books directly through Medium. You’ll need to pay for them separately, as they won’t be included in Medium’s $5 monthly and $50 annual subscriptions. The idea, according to Glose CEO Nicolas Princen, is to create a place where you can explore ideas and topics in depth. "You can read an article and then just one-click purchase a book that connects to that content if you want to go deeper," he told CNN Business.

For Medium, Glose is its 10th acquisition, but it’s a particularly important one as the company tries to get more people to pay for written content while competing against upstarts like Substack. The planned book integration is a smart move when you consider some of the most prolific writers on Medium have publishing deals. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which you’ll find an article by an author and then buy a book from that same person, all without leaving the platform.