Yahoo! Japan Bookstore

» see bookstore.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Yahoo! Japan Bookstore opened on 2 November 2011, built on top of Yahoo! Comic, which had been running since September 2003 as a manga site. The rebuild turned a manga shop into a general bookstore on EPUB, selling files you downloaded and kept. It launched with more than thirty thousand titles at around 300 yen a volume, for Windows first, with the rest of the devices to follow.

Then it did the slow work of a middling storefront for seven years. The BinB reader arrived in July 2012 and let people read in a browser without installing anything, which mattered more in Japan than it sounds, because phone reading was already the whole market. Free manga campaigns ran constantly. A women's comics subscription came and went, closing in May 2018. None of it made Yahoo the place people bought books.

In March 2018 Yahoo signed an alliance with eBook Initiative Japan, the company behind eBookJapan, and the two catalogs started merging into a single store. Sales at Yahoo! Japan Bookstore stopped on 11 March 2019, when every product page began redirecting, and the store itself closed on 28 March. Purchases followed their owners across to the new shop.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two spellings of one name ~

The merger produced a naming situation worth writing down. eBookJapan with the capital B and J was the old independent store, going since 2000, and ebookjapan in lowercase was the joint venture that Yahoo and eBook Initiative Japan ran together. For a few months in 2019 both existed, with the capitalized one winding down its own sales that June while the lowercase one took over its customers.

So the store that closed in March and the store that closed in June both emptied into the same successor, and the successor was the one whose name you could not say out loud in a way that distinguished it from its predecessor. Today bookstore.yahoo.co.jp resolves to ebookjapan.yahoo.co.jp, which is a redirect standing in for the entire history above.

~ what happens to books you bought ~

An ebook store closing is the moment when everyone finds out what they actually purchased. Here the answer was good. Titles bought at Yahoo! Japan Bookstore stayed readable in ebookjapan under the same Yahoo! JAPAN ID, so the shelf survived the shop.

It was not a universal rule that year. Microsoft closed its own ebook business in 2019 and the books simply stopped opening, with refunds issued because there was nothing else to give people. Same product category, same twelve months, two different answers to the question of whether a licensed file is yours. Yahoo's answer worked because there happened to be a sibling store to move the library into.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »