I think this is an important announcement so I’m reprinting their blog post in full:
Introducing the Feedbooks Store
For the last six months or so, we’ve been working on building a great store section for Feedbooks to complement our selection of free public domain and seld-published books.
Building an eBook store, is nothing but trivial: finding the right balance between powerful browsing/searching and a clutter free design is a real challenge, and since Feedbooks is massively consumed through mobile devices (using our mobile website or our OPDS catalog), we had to find an answer to this challenge that also works on smartphones and tablets.
Feedbooks in its current form is fully internationalized in two languages: English and French. Launching a store where we have the majority of publishers for both markets (US & France) was an absolute requirement and we’ve reached that point.
US eBook Store
In December, Feedbooks launched a first version of our eBook Store along with eBooks from “non-agency” publishers, such as Random House for example.
Today, we’re adding three new “agency” publishers to the mix, and in the process vastly improving the selection of content: Harper Collins,Simon & Schuster & Penguin.
We’ll continue to add other publishers in the future including for example MacMillan and Wiley in the very near term.
French eBook Store
The French market is still in its infancy compared to the US market but we’ve already managed to build relationships with the top distribution channels for French books: Immatériel, Interforum/Editis,Eden Livres & De Marque.
Unlike the US market, a lot of eBooks on the French market are actually either DRM-free or watermarked, a very interesting dynamic to follow compared to the US market and great news for eBooks readers in France.
New facets, improved browsing
With the full release of the Feedbooks store, we’re also pushing forward improved browsing through the use of facets on our full website, mobile website and OPDS catalog.
Any search will now return the number of results for each section on Feedbooks, along with suggestions for categories and languages to search for.
Aldiko 2.0, the top reading application on Android
On January the 18th, Aldiko launched Aldiko 2.0, the top reading application on Android with over 2.5+ million users and a higher ranking in the Android Market than the rest of the competition (including Kindle & Google eBooks).
With this new release, Aldiko users can now browse, search and buy eBooks from our store completely in-app.
Aldiko is the first application to fully use the potential of our OPDS catalog, providing one-click payment in-app, supporting facets and displaying featured books to provide the best shopping experience on Android for eBook users.
What’s next ?
The next few months will be incredibly exciting for us and our user base. Among other things, we plan on extending our support for other European markets (for both free and commercial titles), improve the discovery experience through more and better facets, but also build new ways of pushing forward interesting books to read.
I sure hope the US store allows for sales in Canada. I use Aldiko on my Galaxy Tab all the time. A very good application it is too. Until Bluefire makes an appearance.
I looked over FB’s FAQ to sort out the format/DRM issues of the new store, and got all hopeful at their claim “Since our books are DRM-free, they can be read on a variety of dedicated reading devices, smartphones, on a PC or directly in your browser.” Then I looked at the actual books-for-sale, and they say they have DRM, but Feedbooks offers no details about what’s required to read them.
Oh look, just what we need… yet another agency feed ebookstore that doesn’t list the length of the books, doesn’t describe the software & hardware requirements, and won’t let you sort by multiformat vs DRM.