Diesel eBooks

» see diesel-ebooks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the last thing diesel ebooks told its customers was a deadline. download your library by 31 march 2014, because after that date it will not be possible. that is the whole grave in one sentence: you paid for the books, and the books lived on somebody else's server, which had a closing time.

it opened in 2004 and closed a few months short of its tenth birthday. the title tag on the homepage called it the world famous ebook store, which is the kind of thing a small business writes about itself in 2004 and then never gets around to changing. it sold epub. that one technical fact decided everything that happened to it, because epub is the format for every reader on earth that is not a kindle, and by 2010 the kindle was most of the market.

in its last years the catalog leaned hard into romance and independent romance, with category counts sitting right there on the front page. the billionaires club had 1,656 titles in it. that is not a store finding a niche so much as a store discovering which readers were still willing to buy outside amazon, and building the shopfront around them.

i was not a customer. buying ebooks from a us store in 2008 meant a card the store would accept and a licensing map that mostly did not have turkey on it. the sensible thing from here was to wait. by the time waiting paid off the independent stores were already gone and the choice was between two companies that also sold you the hardware.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

the thing that killed diesel is a pricing model, which sounds like nothing and was not. in 2010 the major publishers moved from wholesale to agency pricing, which meant the publisher set the retail price and the store took a commission. under wholesale a small retailer can eat margin to undercut amazon on a bestseller. under agency there is no margin to eat and no price to undercut, so a customer comparing diesel to amazon sees the same number twice and picks the store their reader is already tied to.

diesel was the second independent to go down on this. booksonboard closed the year before. the pattern was clear enough by march 2014 that the trade press wrote it up as a category dying rather than a company failing.

~ what really happened ~

on 24 march 2014 diesel filed an antitrust suit in the southern district of new york against apple, hachette, harpercollins, macmillan, penguin and simon & schuster. same defendants as the department of justice case. two days later it announced it was closing at the end of the month. the public statement was cheerful in a way that reads worse the longer you look at it. it had been a great ride, and ebooks were still in their infant years with many opportunities opening up.

they did go looking. the name came back in january 2016 as diesel digital, a white-label ebookstore provider selling shopfronts to other people instead of books to readers. that is the surviving shape of a lot of these companies. the store dies and the plumbing gets sold to whoever still wants to run a store.

~ what replaced it ~

what diesel proved on the way out is that an ebook is not a book you own, it is an account you hold. the closing notice was not about a bookshop shutting its doors, it was about access expiring. anyone who missed the 31 march deadline lost a paid-for library to a company's calendar, and that is now the normal condition of buying anything digital.

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