Funny. Weren’t e-books supposed to be on the cusp of a revival—given all the ballyhoo about the Sony Reader and the rest? How can we doubt this? Adobe‘s CEO says so.
The paradox du jour
And yet, via DearAuthor.com, we’ve just learned that Random House‘s Contentlink is shutting down. How much is this RH-specific, without too much relevance to the industry as a whole? And how much does this say about the business, especially since Kelley Allen, RH’s new media director, is on the IDPF board?
Was Sony—about whose Reader a Random House executive was rather gung ho some months ago—itself a factor? Has Random House decided to offer books via the Sony store rather than its own? And what are the implications for independent e-stores if even Random House is shutting down its own store? I won’t reach any conclusions now. Encouragingly, e-books are still in the RH catalogue.
Nothing special about the Random House store
Could part of the possible problem also be that Random House was not doing anything special with the store and seemed rather pathetic compared to the true possibilities. Consider the home page. I see a hodgepodge of titles ranging from Dear Playboy Advisor to Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons and Bill O’Reilly’s Culture Warrior. Talk about culture wars!
By contrast, Amazon’s p-bookstore serves up pages tailored to the tastes of the individual reader, and while the company’s Mobipoocket store isn’t that far advanced, I think such wrinkles will be inevitable in e-bookdom.
Wider range of titles
What’s more, Amazon will be able to offer a much wider choice of titles than either Sony or Random House. Unless e-bookstores go after a specific niche, they may be crushed, at least if their customers are mostly in the United States. At the very least they may want to consider interactivity in the Barnes & Noble vein.
Meanwhile, as DA’s Jane reminds us, Contentlink’s customers should download their books now. This is just another reminder that you presently cannot own e-books for real. Would you have to worry about future access to hardbacks if the local Borders shut down? And might the Random House shutdown itself be an illustration of one reason why e-books have yet to take off?
Here’s the exact notice from Random House:
ATTENTION: ContentLink is scheduled to close this month and will not be taking any more orders. Please download and archive all your previously purchased titles. Thank you for shopping at ContentLink.
[…] On the one hand, I thought the contentlink store was crappy. It never had the “new books” featured on its home page. It was hard to tell what books were new additions and what were not. On the other hand there were often books there that were no where else for sale on the net. Hopefully that will change overtime. David Rothman wondered if it signaled some softness in the ebook market or whether it was just a business model wrinkle. […]