From Jerry Justianto of Pocket PC eBook Watch:
An Exclusive Interview with Libwise / Fictionwise’s Scott Pendergrast
What is your vision regarding elibrary in the next 2 years?
Scott: The library market is very important to us. Not only is it a viable market to sell to — but it’s also a way to grow the number of people who READ ebooks overall. Our Libwise product (www.libwise.com) is getting a very good response from libraries so far. We’re going to our first library conference in a few weeks, and it will be interesting to get a lot more feedback.
Fictionwise in the beginning was known for its mutli-format ebooks without Digital Rights Management protection. Why are most of Fictionwise’s ebooks today are using DRM protection (mobipocket-, Palm-, and MS Reader-secured formats)?
Early in 2000 in became clear to us that the major trade publishers were never going to try selling e-books without encryption. That presented us with a problem because each week we were getting requests from our members for the current best-sellers. They were telling us they would prefer to buy from us but were going elsewhere. So in the Spring of 2002, we introduced encrypted formats to meet demand. The reason we now have more encrypted titles than unencrypted is because there are simply so many more available in encrypted formats. We have thousands waiting to go online. We still publish as many MultiFormat ebooks as possible each week–but they are getting harder to find. We still sell more unencrypted titles than encrypted ones–and the smaller publisher who are coming to us are taking advantage of that by selling unencrypted.
