Fictionwise

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

~ the obituary ~

the palm-era ebook store was not a category that reached turkey. i knew about ebooks in general, i read english pdfs of programming books through university, but a dedicated ebook shop where you signed up with a us credit card and downloaded a title in one of a half-dozen file formats priced in dollars was something i mostly only read about. fictionwise was one of the largest of those stores. i learned the name a decade after it died, going through the pre-kindle ebook archive on wikipedia.

brothers steve and scott pendergrast started fictionwise in june 2000 in new jersey. they ran it as a multi-format ebook seller, which meant that whichever palm pilot or ereader-alike device you had, they could give you a copy that would open. this was the actual value in the pre-kindle era. every hardware maker had its own drm scheme (ereader, mobipocket, microsoft reader, plus a few defunct formats). fictionwise negotiated with publishers to sell across all of them, and often sold the same book in drm-free variants for people who trusted themselves not to redistribute it.

by 2008 fictionwise was doing about 1.5 million ebook sales a year. that made it one of the largest ebook stores in north america, alongside amazon's kindle store which had just launched in november 2007. in january 2008 fictionwise acquired ereader.com from motricity, the successor company that had absorbed peanut press, one of the earliest palm ebook shops. that acquisition consolidated a lot of pre-kindle ebook catalog under one owner.

~ the case file ~

~ the acquisition ~

barnes & noble bought fictionwise on 5 march 2009 for $15.7 million plus potential earn-outs. the strategic logic was that b&n needed a digital reader story to compete with the kindle, and fictionwise had years of catalog contracts and a working ebook storefront. the nook launched later that year built on much of that groundwork. fictionwise itself kept running as a separate storefront under b&n ownership.

the pendergrasts had picked b&n specifically because b&n agreed to keep supporting multi-format and drm-free ebook standards. that promise held for about two years. by 2011 b&n had standardized on epub for the nook and lost interest in the older formats. sales through fictionwise fell as the customer base migrated to nook accounts. the standalone storefront became a maintenance burden with no strategic reason to keep alive.

~ the end ~

on 16 november 2012 barnes & noble announced that fictionwise.com and its two sister sites (ereader.com and ebookwise.com) would all wind down. sales stopped on 4 december 2012. us customers had until 21 december to transfer their bookshelves to a nook account and keep access to their purchases. after that date the fictionwise servers stopped serving previously bought books. some titles were not eligible for transfer because of format mismatch or contract terms. those books were simply lost.

the shutdown was quiet by later ebook-store-death standards. nobody protested outside b&n stores. the customer base was mostly older palm-and-sony-reader loyalists who had already made peace with the format wars. teleread and gear diary wrote angry blog posts about lost purchases and the fictionwise reddit thread ran a hundred comments deep. that was about it.

~ what carried over ~

proof that you could sell ebooks in multiple formats to a real customer base for over a decade before the market consolidated on one device. [[palm-pilot]] and [[sony-reader]] both died as hardware. fictionwise died as a catalog. the shape of the palm-and-ereader-format ebook world got flattened into kindle epub in the same window between 2010 and 2012. drm-free ebooks became a niche corner of the market instead of a mainstream offering. by 2020 kindle epub was so dominant that a store like fictionwise, offering the same book in six formats, sounded like something from a much earlier internet than nine years before.

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