Rocket eBook

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

~ the obituary ~

the rocket ebook shipped in late 1998. i was 14, on 33.6k dial-up in ankara, and the idea that anyone would pay $499 for a device that held ten books was not a conversation turkish suburbia was having. e-readers as a category did not really register in turkey until the kindle got a paperwhite around 2013. this is one of those graves where the whole story is on the other side of the atlantic and i can only reconstruct it from the specs and the press coverage.

nuvomedia was a two-person startup founded on 15 april 1997 by martin eberhard and marc tarpenning in palo alto. eberhard is the one you have probably heard of. he later co-founded tesla motors in july 2003, one week before nuvomedia's ebook store shut down, though the timing is coincidence. the rocket ebook was his first hardware product. the device weighed about 22 ounces, ran a monochrome touchscreen lcd, held about ten average-length books in onboard flash, and got a claimed 33 hours of reading on a charge.

they sold roughly 20,000 units at $499 in 1999. that is a small number by modern hardware standards, but it made the rocket the first e-reader with more than a few thousand serious owners. barnes and noble stocked it. amazon (still a books-only retailer at the time) resold it. really though, the content model was the piece that got it into press: nuvomedia licensed encrypted book files from major publishers and sold them through the rocketlibrarian desktop app, so the flywheel of hardware plus first-party bookstore existed by 1999 rather than 2007.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the specs are worth spelling out because they mostly held up. the screen was a 320-by-480 monochrome lcd with backlight and capacitive-ish stylus input, plus softkey buttons for page turn on both sides so a lefty could hold it either way. the flash memory took ten average-sized books at launch, expandable to about forty with a memory card. by then, the desktop app on windows or mac managed the library and pushed titles to the device over a serial cradle. all of this was five years earlier than the first-gen kindle, which shipped in november 2007 with an eink screen and cellular delivery.

the rocket sold enough to prove the shape but not enough to make nuvomedia profitable on its own. gemstar-tv guide acquired both nuvomedia and softbook press in january 2000 for a combined roughly $187 million in stock. gemstar rolled the rocket design into the rca reb 1100 (b&w screen) and the softbook design into the reb 1200 (color screen). those two were on shelves through 2002.

~ what killed it ~

this happened outside the parts of the internet i was reading closely. gemstar had bought nuvomedia and softbook as part of a bigger strategy of pulling premium consumer-tech brands under its interactive-tv-guide umbrella, and the ebook business was supposed to grow into a major line. it did not. the retail numbers stayed flat for two years while gemstar poured money into content licensing. really though, by mid-2002 the entire gemstar holding was in accounting trouble, with sec investigations into the interactive tv side and revenue restatements north of $100 million.

the ebook division got cut for cash reasons rather than product reasons. gemstar announced in june 2003 that it was stopping ebook hardware sales, and the online ebook store, where you actually bought titles for the device, went dark on 16 july 2003. every reader in the field kept the books it had, but any customer who wanted to buy a new title after that date had no way to. anyway, without a live store the whole platform stopped meaning anything and the devices ended up on ebay for a stretch of the mid-2000s.

~ what it became ~

the kindle in 2007 borrowed the exact shape of the rocket ebook's business model: dedicated device plus first-party bookstore, with a drm-locked format that nobody else could resell. amazon added the eink screen and the whispernet cellular delivery on top of a much larger publisher catalog, but the frame of "buy the device, then buy the books from us" was the nuvomedia frame first. eberhard has said in interviews that the rocket ebook was the project that taught him how to ship consumer hardware, and everything he did at tesla was downstream of that experience.

the rocket ebook is one of the few graves where the founder went on to have a bigger second act than the product itself. the product died with gemstar's accounting scandal, but the pattern it proved kept running through kindle and every reader that followed. the device you touched in a barnes and noble store in 1999 was already showing you where the reading market was going.

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