MightyWords

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

~ the obituary ~

Chris MacAskill's pitch fit in one line: greater than a magazine article, and smaller than a book. Fatbrain, then the third online bookseller behind Amazon and Barnes & Noble, had started selling electronic documents under the brand eMatter in the summer of 1999. The piece with no home in publishing was the forty-page one, too long to run in a magazine and too short to bind, and eMatter existed to sell exactly that, with the writer keeping a real share of the price.

It got spun out as MightyWords Inc. and mightywords.com opened in March 2000. The first crawl of it, on 7 April that year, is seven kilobytes of links that still point back at ematter.fatbrain.com, because the new company was running on the old company's servers and inside the old company's building for a while yet.

Self-publishing in 2000 meant a professional in the United States putting a technical paper on a credit card, which was not a transaction available to a sixteen year old in Turkey on a dial-up line. I came to this one entirely afterward, mostly through the words of people who worked there.

~ the case file ~

~ the money ~

Barnes & Noble's online arm put in twenty million dollars in June 2000 for thirty percent. That September it bought Fatbrain for sixteen million in cash and inherited another twenty-three percent of MightyWords along with it, which took the holding to fifty-three. Vulcan Ventures, Paul Allen's firm, put in ten million. Two other firms added six between them.

So the majority holder of the company was also its largest competitor in the same product. Executives inside said so at the time, in writing, more than once. They were told it would not be a problem.

~ the engineering ~

The first version was built by the consultancy Scient on Solaris and Oracle with Adobe's DRM layered on top, and it launched in December 2000. The DRM was the problem. For every purchase the site generated an average of two support tickets from people who could not open the thing they had just bought, a two hundred percent support rate, which is a number you rarely see anybody write down.

The rewrite shipped in the spring of 2001 and support fell to around fifty percent. By that summer there were fifty thousand titles live with another seventy-five thousand waiting on internal servers, and sales were climbing month over month. The company's CTO, who published his own account years later under the name Hawke, put break-even inside six months as of August 2001.

~ what came after ~

Then the majority holder changed its mind. Barnes & Noble pulled back from its online investments after September 2001 and wanted its remaining millions out of the companies it controlled. In October MacAskill told the department heads to plan a shutdown and not to tell their staff yet. Eleven people were laid off on 11 December. Publishers Weekly ran the story on 17 December with MacAskill's line in it: the adoption for digital publishing isn't happening as fast as we hoped. Twelve people stayed to the end of February to close the books.

The homepage on 24 January 2002 was 732 bytes. The retail logo over one sentence: "We regret to inform you that MightyWords has ceased operations effective January 12, 2002. We greatly appreciate your business." Thirty thousand documents and nine hundred content partners went off the web that week. Amazon shipped the same idea as the Kindle Single in 2011, with nobody on its board selling against it.

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