This week's ebook news continues with the announcement that Barnes & Noble has purchased ebook seller Fictionwise for $15.7 million in cash, plus undisclosed earn-out payments if the company meets certain objectives over the next two years.
Fictionwise, founded in 2000 by Steve and Scott Pendergrast, operates the eReader.com site as well as Fictionwise.com. Barnes & Noble says the founders will continue to operate the sites as a separate business unit within Barnes & Noble.
eReader.com sells books only for the eReader Pro software which is available for a wide range of mobile platforms (the notable exception being the Blackberry), as well Windows and OS X computers.
Fictionwise.com, on the other hand, covers a broad range of digital book formats, including audiobooks.
One of the challenges of selling ebooks (pre-Kindle) has been the plethora of formats available. Grabbing a random example off of Fictionwise.com, here's what we find under "available formats":
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [828 KB], eReader (PDB) [289 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [284 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [252 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [279 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [280 KB], hiebook (KML) [659 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [329 KB], iSilo (PDB) [235 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [294 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [356 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [412 KB]
This strikes me as both a strength and a weakness of ebook sellers. If you've got any kind of device with a screen you can probably find an ebook reader that supports one of these formats. But as a new user hitting the site, the choices can seem overwhelming. Presumably this is the reason for the more focused eReader.com site: Step 1, download our reader software for your device. Step 2, Start buying books from us.
This is also why Amazon probably has the best shot of taking ebooks mainstream.
Barnes & Noble abandoned ebooks once, so why are they coming back to them now? Because the format is starting to take off. Why is that? What's popular on Fictionwise? Well, once again it seems like porn is blazing a path to a new media format. Of the top 10 bestsellers under the "Multiformat" category, nine are tagged "erotica" amd the last is "dark fantasy".
Hey, I'm not judging anyone (one of my dearest friends is an erotic romance author) and yes, I've used the most salacious Top 10 list on the site in my example, but this data backs up my anecdotal observations. People who read erotic romance and 'bodice rippers' love ebooks because of the privacy they offer, both during purchase and when reading.
One of my favorite geek thespians, Felicia Day, apparently agrees with me. Here're a few recent tweets from her:
My Dad got me a Kindle 2.0! Thx Dad!
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eReader coming to Blackberry soon
Fictionwise has almost finished work on their Blackberry client; it's in beta now and I hear that they'll be making it available soon.The reason for the separate eReader site, by the way, is that eReader was formerly a separate company (originally known as Peanut Press, then Palm Digital Media) until Fictionwise bought it so that they would have an e-book format of their own that nobody could abruptly decide to stop licensing to them.
Not surprising
Hello,This is not particularly surprising to me at all. About 15 years ago, I worked at Tribal Voice, one of the first chat and instant messaging companies, and we thought we were building tools that would allow friends and family to communicate over long distances, that would allow employees to collaborate more effectively and so forth. A large enough percentage of our users were using the technology for racy chat that we ended up opening an adults-only directory server for them to keep them off the main system.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Or gee, it could just be
Or gee, it could just be that romance/erotica novels in *any* format by far outsell any other genre, comprising over one third of all fiction sales, and they have for years. But then, that wouldn't make a great tag line would it?