Happy Birthday, eFictionReaderWise!

Just over one year ago, on January 9th, 2008, Fictionwise bought its oldest, largest surviving competitor, eReader, marking the end of eReader’s long journey through a series of four previous owners.

E-book hot potato

eReader began life as Peanut Press, one of the first e-book vendors for the Palm Pilot platform. The company had the distinction of being the only e-book vendor for the Palm to offer both its own e-book reader and its own e-book file format. (I suppose you could count Mobipocket.com, but Mobi was more of a software company first and a bookstore second; Peanut was the other way around.)

But Peanut did not stay self-owned for long. In 2000, the company was acquired by NetLibrary—which then turned around and sold it to Palm Inc., the makers of the Palm Pilot, which renamed it Palm Digital Media.

The game of e-book hot potato continued in 2003, when Palm sold off its Palm Reader division to Motricity—which apparently didn’t want to go back to the “Peanut Press” name, and hence renamed it eReader (leading to a great deal of confusion among those who refer to any generic e-book reading software or device or person as an “e-reader”). Motricity held onto eReader longer than its prior owners had, but in January 2008 sold the division to Fictionwise.

A format of its own

Fictionwise’s purchase of eReader gave the company ownership of its very own multiplatform, DRM-capable e-book format—something very important in the modern world of e-books, where many e-book formats are owned by direct competitors. For example, Mobipocket is owned by Amazon,com, which uses it for the Kindle and may be suppressing it from being released to the iPhone. What if Amazon decided to close down competing e-book stores’ use of Mobipocket altogether? Owning eReader gives Fictionwise assurance that it can continue to sell e-books with the DRM that publishers insist on putting on them.

It took nearly a whole year for the wisdom of this approach to become obvious—Overdrive refused to renew its contract with Fictionwise to serve DRM-protected books, potentially leaving customers without continued access to their works. However, since Fictionwise owns the eReader format, the company is able to negotiate with publishers to replace the Mobipocket works with versions in eReader—thus giving customers at least some access to those works that would otherwise be lost.

Other Accomplishments

Under Fictionwise’s ownership, eReader has made a number of important moves, helping Fictionwise to build momentum in the e-book field. eReader updated existing clients and released new clients for Mac OS X and the iPhone (and the iPhone client was good enough even to siphon Kindle-users away), and have plans for Blackberry and Linux clients in the near future. eReader created mobile versions of the eReader and Fictionwise sites, for easier shopping from iPhones and other cellphones.

eReader released the “Pro” versions of the eReader client for free, and removed restrictive licensing on the use of the eReader e-book format by other publishers. eReader also embarked on a drive to get all or almost all of its Mobipocket-only books available in eReader as well. The company licensed the eReader format and DRM to Stanza, and helped Stanza open their own branded Fictionwise store.

Despite some observers’ fears, the eReader store has not been “ruined” by the acquisition. It continues to exist separately and independently of Fictionwise, though it did phase out newsletter discount codes in favor of a new, slightly confusing recursive discount system.

What Lies Ahead

In the coming year, eReader will be updating its reader to accept a new version of the eReader format—the popular ePub format in an eReader DRM wrapper. It’s about time the format got an update, as it is definitely starting to show its age in the form of such limitations as a cover image that can be no larger than 64 kilobytes.

Hopefully eReader will continue to expand to new platforms—Android Linux, the Palm Pre for example—and license its format in places where expanding wouldn’t be possible.

One thing that a number of people have wished for is the ability to read eReader files on dedicated e-book devices such as the Cybook. Whether this is even remotely possible is anybody’s guess, but Steve Pendergrast has made clear that Fictionwise is committed to getting eReader on as many platforms as possible.

Although Stanza has gotten a lot more more press on the iPhone, Fictionwise and eReader also continue to have hundreds of thousands of client downloads and sell hundreds of thousands of e-books, helping give the iPhone and iPod Touch its reputation as a viable e-book alternative to the Kindle. As the only commercial e-book DRM format fully readable on the iPhone, eReader’s future looks brighter and brighter the longer Mobipocket fails to release a reader of its own.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Chris,

    Thanks for a thoughtful article, and thanks for the kind words!

    Yes, 2008 was an astoundingly busy year for us, but in the coming months I think it will be clear that 2009 will but just as busy, if not more so. Our vision is “eReader Everywhere”.

    -Steve P.

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.