Posted on 02/02/2009 1:00:38 PM PST by MrEdd
I was pitched headfirst into the world of e-books in 2002 when I took a job with Palm Digital Media. The company, originally called Peanut Press, was founded in 1998 with a simple plan: publish books in electronic form. As it turns out, that simple plan leads directly into a technological, economic, and political hornet's nest. But thanks to some good initial decisions (more on those later), little Peanut Press did pretty well for itself in those first few years, eventually having a legitimate claim to its self-declared title of "the world's largest e-book store."
Unfortunately, despite starting the company near the peak of the original dot-com bubble, the founders of Peanut Press lost control of the company very early on. In retrospect, this signaled an important truth that persists to this day: people don't get e-books.
A succession of increasingly disengaged and (later) incompetent owners effectively killed Peanut Press, first flattening its growth curve, then abandoning all of the original employees by moving the company several hundred miles away. In January of 2008, what remained of the once-proud e-book store (now called eReader.com) was scraped up off the floor and acquired by a competitor, Fictionwise.com.
Unlike previous owners, Fictionwise has some actual knowledge of and interest in e-books. But though the "world's largest e-book store" appellation still adorns the eReader.com website, larger fish have long since entered the pond.
(Excerpt) Read more at arstechnica.com ...
bookmark.
“I love the device. With the GEBLibrarian download, a lot of different formats can be converted for use with the ebook.”
Even pdf files?
“Publishers will be dealing with the same problems that newspapers are now.”
I agree. I think we will see the publishing world turned upside down. Where the author takes back control of the content and the Editor/Marketing people are hired to assist the author instead of the Publisher hiring the author.
No, not pdf files yet. If I am not mistaken there is another program that converts pdf.
SD, can you chime in on that? I don't recall the product.
RS
I’ve got a Sony eBook. For someone like me who travels amost weekly, it’s fantastic. I can go through two or three books a week, and since it supports PDF as well I can keep my reference materials on it. The screen is easy on the eyes, it’s light and compact, and a goes for between two and three weeks between battery charges.
Books, even new releases, generally cost about half of the hardcover and usually less than paperback. There are plenty of places you can get classics for no cost at all.
Thanks for the report,...got one on the shelf that I haven’t tried yet...time to break it out.
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