Feedbooks

» see feedbooks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Feedbooks was founded in Paris in June 2007 by Hadrien Gardeur, Loïc Roussel and David Julien, at a moment when the ebook question was still open and the answer was not obviously going to be a single American retailer. Their position was that free books deserved the same production values as paid ones. Public domain texts were typeset rather than dumped, with real chapter breaks and a table of contents that worked, and they came out in EPUB and in the Kindle format, so the file you downloaded matched the device you owned.

The catalog grew past 80,000 titles and covered two different things at once: the out-of-copyright canon, and original works from authors who used the site's self-publishing tools to put books out themselves. By 2011 it was pushing around three million ebook downloads a month.

What made those numbers possible was that Feedbooks did not wait for you to visit. It published its shelves as open catalog feeds, which meant any reading app could point at them, and many did; you opened a reader on your phone, tapped whatever it called its store, and there was Feedbooks, unbranded and preinstalled. The company later ended up owning Aldiko, one of the Android readers that worked that way.

Public domain is a phrase that means something different depending on where you read. The Feedbooks shelves were deep in English and French and had very little in Turkish, so from here it functioned as a well-built front end to books I could already get elsewhere rather than as a library of my own literature. I suspect a lot of the world met it exactly like that: the nicest looking copy of a book somebody else's country stopped charging for.

~ the dossier ~

~ receivership ~

The business underneath was in trouble well before readers noticed. Feedbooks entered receivership in June 2018, having lost close to half its turnover across its last three years while carrying substantial debt. On 29 August 2019 a commercial court settlement sold its assets, as part of a disposal plan, to De Marque, a Quebec digital book distributor.

The price was 230,000 euros, roughly a quarter of a million dollars, and it bought the bookstore, a catalog counted at about 900,000 titles and the Aldiko app with its two million or so users. De Marque's own catalog went from 480,000 titles to 1.4 million in a single transaction. Roussel, who had co-founded the thing twelve years earlier, called it a natural progression and said the project could now keep going at a new speed.

~ the closure that took five months ~

The end was announced in February 2024. The ebook trade blogs picked it up at the start of March and printed a closing date of 15 March, with the standard advice: log in now, download everything you bought, because the accounts are going away. The company's own mailer, sent as the date approached, said Feedbooks would close in a few days and gave 31 May 2024 as the final deadline to pull your library down, with a warning that some titles you had already paid for might not be downloadable at all for reasons outside its control.

Then the site just kept standing there. On 17 July 2024 the homepage was still browsable, with covers being served fresh that same week and a banner across the top reading "After 16 years online, Feedbooks will soon close down." By 1 August the host was answering with a redirect. The handover date on record is 23 July 2024, when feedbooks.com began pointing at Cantook, the replacement De Marque built. Cantook's bookstore is licensed for France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg, so for readers anywhere else the succession was a closure with extra steps.

~ the holding page ~

The last clean look anyone got at the domain was in November 2025, and it was a maintenance page: a white background repeating one sentence in three languages, French at the top, saying the site was down for scheduled maintenance and would be back shortly. That is De Marque's standard holding page, left facing outward at an address that has not had anything behind it for over a year. Today even that is gone behind a bot challenge, so the maintenance notice is the last thing Feedbooks is known to have said.

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