Friday News: Fictionwise Shutters Its Doors; Real Readers Read Print; Mills & Boon Meets Bollywood; Readers Unlikely to Pay Substantial Sums for Subscription
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From my inbox:
Dear Fictionwise Publisher/Author,
As you may know, Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise, Inc. (Fictionwise) on March 3, 2009. Fictionwise runs several eBook websites, including Fictionwise.com, eReader.com and eBookwise.com. Over the past few years there has been a significant decrease in demand for many of the eBook formats that Fictionwise.com sells. In contrast, the new industry standard eBook format supported by Barnes & Noble–ePub–is growing in popularity.
This letter is to notify you that Fictionwise will wind down its operations on December 4, 2012. The Fictionwise sites (including Fictionwise.com, eReader.com and eBookwise.com) will end sales on December 4, 2012 and U.S. Fictionwise customers will cease to have access to their Fictionwise Bookshelf through the site after December 21, 2012. Customers outside the U.S. will cease to have access to their Fictionwise Bookshelf through the site after January 31, 2013. Fictionwise customers will be notified of this and U.S. and U.K. customers will be given an opportunity to move their customer accounts, including their eBooks purchased at the Fictionwise websites, to a Barnes & Noble NOOK Library.
Pursuant to section 2 of the agreement between Fictionwise and you, we hereby provide you with ninety (90) days notice that this agreement will terminate effective February 13th. Your final 4th quarter royalty statement and payment will be mailed February 15th.
If you are not already selling your titles at BN.com and would like to do so, please visit www.pubit.com.
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iRock ties up with Mills & Boon – iRock Films and Mills&Boon are an exclusive couple in India. iRock will be making films and TV content based on the Mills&Boon library. There will be three titles launched in the next 18 months. Bollywood Hungama
I googled iRock and came up with this Facebook page which made me wonder if iRock is Bollywood’s version of Joe Francis’ Girls Gone Wild franchise. Let’s hope not.
The Sobering Economics of Ebook Subscription Services – According to surveys of consumers in the UK, readers are not willing to pay more than £10 per month for a Netflix/Spotify access to books. The tone of this article seemed to reflect surprise at this but when movies and music can be obtained in a subscription type form for less, it is unlikely that readers are going to pay more for access to books that they don’t own. Why the surprise? Digital Book World
Penguin eBooks Now Available to All Libraries via a Crappy Deal with 3M Cloud Library – Penguin is making its books available to digital libraries but only through the 3M software and only six months after the initial publication date. The retail license is good for one year only. The Digital Reader
Reading on a Kindle is not the same as reading a book. – Slate Magazine – This is the type of article beloved by true bibliophiles. In fact, I saw Ron Charles of the Washington Post tweet that he reviewed a book that he read on the Kindle. He wouldn’t repeat the horrid experience. The fact is that true readers read print. Everyone else from the able bodied to the sight impaired to those with arthritic wrists or even those who have disabilities is not truly reading. Slate
“Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies.”
In the strangest essay I’ve read on the subject of ereaders = bad, Andrew Piper places his justifications on the classics. St. Augustine’s conversion, for example, was marked by marking his place in the Bible with his finger.
“We know Augustine was reading a book from the way he randomly accesses a page and uses his finger to mark his place. The conversion at the heart of The Confessions was an affirmation of the new technology of the book within the lives of individuals, indeed, as the technology that helped turn readers into individuals. Turning the page, not turning the handle of the scroll, was the new technical prelude to undergoing a major turn in one’s own life.”
Piper goes on to state that it is the book’s physical form that actually allows the words printed therein to change our lives. No scroll predating a bound book and no words formed by pixels on a screen can do the same.
Moreover, our bodies are yearning for tactility (in the rise of touchscreens) and rejecting the hardware (in the form of developing carpal tunnel from pushing the buttons on the device). It’s a many word opus that is almost too farcical to believe.
Maybe Piper should read the 1 John 2:16
For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world.
RIP Fictionwise…..you were always my go to site for ebooks. Oh how I lived for your sales and coupons. I even had their ereader. I have all my books backed up but I will have my 200+ books transferred to Barnes.
Fictionwise had drm-free multi-format and huge excerpts of every title right there. You could download all the formats as often as you wanted. There even was easy bulk download. They regularly had sales. Of course they went down after B&N bought them.
@Estara:
I’ve been in constant book-related fear ever since Amazon bought Book Depository…
So I clicked on the link to switch my Fictionwise account over, and guess what? According to Barnes & Noble, my e-mail address doesn’t match their records! Which is kind of odd, considering that I received an e-mail informing me that I could opt into getting Nook versions of my ebooks.
Why doesn’t this surprise me??
You also can’t transfer a lot of books you bought at FW to Nook, for whatever reason. The full list here: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/container/nook_full.asp?PID=45600
RIP Fictionwise. It’s demise was probable when B & N acquired them and inevitable when the publishers stick the knife in and twisted with their agency pricing. It is why I will never believe publishers when the prattle on about “preserving competition.”
That Slate article killed me, but I guess it really isn’t an “article”” and I guess I wasn’t really READING it since it is online and not in a codex form…
Well, this should be interesting.
My Nook may explode. I’ve got about 1200 Nookbooks. And I’ve got 989 Fictionwise titles and and 589 ereader.com titles. I’m also going to be vaguely interested to see what happens to duplicates (I didn’t do it on purpose usually, I know there are some. Some of them are things I forgot I had in the old format, some were super cheap (a lot of 99 cent first books that I already had on fictionwise I’d repurchase) and so on. I’m off to look for the email.
That’s some Luddite bullshit, right there.
This is pretty frustrating. There doesn’t seem to be any way for me to easily figure out which of my titles did not transfer and which did. So far, though, I have 37 books in my Nook account and 747 books I purchased at Fictionwise.
@Estara:
I’m not a Fictionwise customer (although I have an account there just in case) and I’m not thrilled by this development. Doesn’t B&N carry the same titles as Fictionwise, anyway? If there’s any truth to this, then the only reason I see B&N buying Fictionwise is to punish readers for going to non-B&N/non agency priced sources. Granted, I loathe the Big Six publishers and B&N (their best friend) so I have a much less optimistic view of B&N’s intentions, but I don’t feel good about this and based on some of the additional comments on this site, I’m not alone.
@Jane: NONE of my books transferred over.
I just tried the transfer and of the 440 books in my Fictionwise account (some are duplicates from when they lost OverDrive as a distro and gave folks eReader versions) they transferred 19 books.
Looking at the 19 some things are strange. One of the books is from a now defunct publisher and a couple others are with different publishers now than the versions in my account. I wouldn’t think they’d be able to get the rights to do that. Also they transferred one or two books from various publishers such as Samhain, but there are tons more from the same publishers that they didn’t transfer (and aren’t on the no transfer list) in fact B&N is now trying to sell me books I have in my FW account based on the few that did transfer.
I hope more than the 19 transfer over (although I do have backups of my FW account) otherwise the whole transfer thing seems pretty useless.
How long did it take to get the email with further instructions?
@romsfuulynn: Do you mean the one with the “transfer code”? Mine came as soon as I opted to do the transfer.
Jeez, I used to buy from Fictionwise a LOT, and the comments so far don’t make the transfer sound promising. I think I have most of my books already sitting on my hard drive, but they’re in Secure ereader format. And quite frankly, I’m very busy with Real Life stuff, so this move from B&N gives me one more reason to not buy anything new from them.
Still waiting for a code and further instructions. . . I’m pretty sure I’ve got almost everything downloaded long since, and in Calibre. I would actually like to have stuff in the B&N account, but the numbers transferring doesn’t look good.
Discussion at teleread.com also.
I read that Salon article a few days ago and rolled my eyes so hard I think I ripped a cornea. I wonder if he eschews airplanes when describing what ‘real’ travel is?
I am hoping that my dismal 4 out of 229 books transferred is because it may take them time to transfer everything. Maybe they’re overloaded today. That may be wishful thinking, but I will give the benefit of the doubt for some amount of time. I had gone through the trouble of archiving my FW books when Microsoft Reader announced it was stopping support. I wanted to be sure I had everything before that became an issue. It was a huge headache.
Also, I read somewhere in the instructions that only the books available in epub could be moved over.
Haha! I am so déclassé I often listen to audiobooks. Yes, someone reads the book to me and I don’t even use my eyes.
I am sad about Fictionwise. I took a chance on a lot of books that I would otherwise have ignored because of their deep sales.
I got…8 books out of the transfer. I think I had already Calibred most of them because the bulk of them were MSreader for my eBookwise. But still, I was thinking that it would be nice to have my library ready at BN with no work from me if I ever got a Nook. I probably won’t, since I like my Kindle so much…but you never know.
@Tina:
“Merely sitting in a flying tin is not travelling. No, to truly travel one must walk the land on one’s own barefeet to feel the hum and hearbeat of the earth echo with your own.”
This!!! ROFLMAO
My transfer netted me 100 out of the 340+ books I had at Fictionwise. There doesn’t seem to be much sense for what went through and what didn’t transfer over. I’m pretty sure I have them all saved, but I’ll have to run through the list when I get home tonight.
Guess I should’ve taken advantage of that last 45% off coupon.
I heard the “I prefer real books” claim from someone I hadn’t thought so uninformed just yesterday. I am reminded of The Velveteen Rabbit; who decides what and who is real?
@Tina, your flying analogy is perfect.
Anyway, back in September I took everything I owned and brought it into Calibre. During the process, I thought maybe I was wasting my time and now I see that I wasn’t.
RIP, Fictionwise. You did everything (except your website design) right.
Barnes and Noble only transferred 74 of my 485 Fictionwise bookshelf. Time to back up the old fashioned way.
To me, Fictionwise died back when B&N purchased them. I think I have shopped there once since the introduction of Agency Pricing. But I will always have very fond memories of them in their heyday and I still miss Micropay (especially the 100% back on NYT Best Sellers!)
I don’t have an account at B&N. Most of my Fictionwise library already went the way of the Dodo since it was in LIT format.
The Salon article is an amazing thing. Rarely will you read such total nonsense dressed up in such erudite verbiage. He based a lot of his argument on St Augustine, someone who lived 1000 years before the invention of the printing press.
My father in law is paralyzed and due to his condition spends a lot of time in bed. He told me his Kindle changed his life-giving him independence to buy his own books without relying on someone else to drive him or deliver it to his bedside, and letting him read for hours since it is easier to manage than a print book. Now I will have to break the news to him that he actually hasn’t been reading!
An online magazine publishes a screed disparaging the reading of anything that’s not printed on paper. Huh. I don’t quite know what to make of that. It’s just bizarre.
I am so glad that the first thing I did on buying anything from Fictionwise was break the DRM and convert the files into EPUB and LRF.
I still have all my ebooks in various storage formats, and the only thing I’ll lose out on is the micropay balance that they refused to refund.
@Jess: No worries, Jess. I was being sarcastic, myself. The buyout already happened in 2009 as the e-mail Jane quoted points out. They just never gave them any additional support afterwards and while AllRomance, BooksonBoard, etc. had managed to get agency publishers into their shops at some point, Fictionwise never did again – as far as I remember. It wasn’t a pretty site, but apart from not making it easy to discover new books I thought it had some of the best usability for eReaders around.
For everyone trying to make sure they’ve got their books – if you haven’t bought them in drm-free multi-format that you can organise in Calibre already, I suggest getting the drm-cracking plugins for Calibre and importing all the secure titles, then having Calibre convert them into the format you read these days. At least you’ll have your books (I import any book I buy into calibre right away and check that all the metadata is there: I’d loose my way in the jungle of TBRs completely otherwise)
@A.M.K.: Yes, I’m wondering when the other shoe will drop there, as well.
@Tina: *LOL* Lovely done.
ugh. Out of 79 Fictionwise books …. 3 transferred into Barnes and Noble.
And that is EXACTLY why I will never purchase any ebook that I can’t strip the DRM and back-up into my own system immediately.
I wish I could discern the contents of this post, but since it was not written on the skin of a virgin koala, using ink made from the crushed wings of swallowtail butterflies, and a pen made from narwahl tooth, I’m afraid I can find no meaning in these scattered pictograms on the visual display mechanism of this device powered by electricity, which we all know is an arcane magical power created by demons determined to steal your soul.
@Ann Somerville: Oh. My. God. I’m dying…
Ahhh Fictionwise…I loved you so. Only a fraction of my 1300+ books transferred. Most are already downloaded but some aren’t so I will be working my little fingers (and external drive) to death this weekend.
I still had not gotten an access code from clicking through on the email. I sent a message to support, but also tried again. It now says I will get an email next week. (Will also be busy downloading.
Thank you for choosing to transfer your library to NOOK.
You will receive an email the week of November 19, 2012 with your access code and further instruction.
@Tina: 100%. And you are only fully experiencing music if you listen to your very own orchestra in person. Radio, vinyl, CD, digital, etc.–none of these media qualify you as a real listener. And make sure you don’t watch TV or movies. Only viewing Greek drama from a seat in a stone amphitheater will do. What a putz.
@Tina: That was my thought, too! Of course he only attends live theatre, never a movie, and he only view television as a member of the studio audience, I’m sure.
Sigh. I totally get it that some people prefer the paper reading experience. But why so judgmental?
@Shelley: The Fictionwise bulk download has an option that lets you download all your previously NOT downloaded books in one zip-file (at least for the drm-free ones) in a format of your choice. I found that useful when sales made me buy quite a few books at once.
I spent hours yesterday checking that I’d downloaded all the books in my and TheHusand’s ereader and fictionwise accounts. I was able to grab all but about half a dozen of our 400+ books. The bulk download option at fictionwise was basically useless because most of the books couldn’t be downloaded that way. When I tried I got error messages instead of books. Of the 230-odd books at Fictionwise, 16 transferred to B&N. I haven’t bothered to see how many of the ereader books were transferred.
When I first read the Slate article I had the same reaction as everyone else here. But I was curious about the writer. It turns out he’s not a Luddite, but rather a humanities professor at McGill who is interested in the role the book as object plays in society and cognition. I have no idea why he gave Slate that particular excerpt because it makes him look like a jerk and distracts from the more interesting points he’s making. But then I rarely go wrong ignoring Slate these days.
@Sunita:
In theory it’s good that this Slate writer carries his college work over to non-college time, but like you said, the piece made him sound like a jerk and distracts from any mroe interesting points he could make. Maybe it’s Slate’s fault for printing that piece rather than a more in-depth perspective, but it rankles all the same. I agreed with the commenters on the Slate article as well as this post that reading is reading regardless of the format and that people who go on about “Only print books are real books” are the same people who like reading as an idea rather than an action. When I read a book, I want the story. If I can get that story in whatever format I’m reading, then I’m a happy reader. In short, I still think this man has misguided views unless there’s a follow-up article that further explains the point he was trying to make.
@Susan: OMG! I’m rolling!!
@Estara: Thanks for the tip! That is what I’m working on today.
Does anyone else see the hypocrisy (or is it irony? both?) of the author allowing a printing an ONLINE ARTICLE in an ONLINE NEWSPAPER (if you can call Slate that – I say it is!), talking about how reading a book on an e-reader isn’t truly reading?
Shouldn’t this luddite have only given permission to a PAPER-ONLY newspaper, since, well, you aren’t really reading his article unless you are using a physical form of wood pulp?
Right?
RE: Slate article
It’s all those pesky electric light bulbs. They really screwed everything up!
I think there is a difference between reading on a Kindle and reading a print book–with a Kindle you lose that sense of “place” within a book, and also a certain sense of tactility. I’m reading One For The Books right now, and the author asserts something similar. Although I do wonder whether all of this is due to a sort of psychosomatic self-convincing thing, or whether this is truly the case…
@Stephanie @ Read in a Single Sitting:
That can be a good thing though if you find yourself intimidated by long stretches of text. I’ve developed ADD and can’t read for hours like I used to. I look at a print book and think “gosh that’s a lot of words.” But if I read on my phone or ereader with the text size cranked up, I don’t get overwhelmed by the amount of text because it’s broken into small pieces and I can’t see the whole thing.
I got an email from BN re: FW to Nook transfer:
I still have only one book on Nook. I hope I see all my books before Thanksgiving.
About the paper vs. electronic experience. I heard a funny story from a friend recently. He’s a long time ebook reader/user and often takes advantage of the dictionary function. The other day he was reading a paper book, and came across a word he was unsure of, and tapped it with his finger a time or two to get a defininition before realizing that doesn’t work with paper books. . .
@Stephanie @ Read in a Single Sitting: I feel the same way (although perhaps it would be different if I had a touchscreen device?). It doesn’t so much affect my initial reading of a book or story, but it does affect how I interact with it, or don’t, later on. I’ve bought many, many print books because I enjoyed them when I checked them out from the library and wanted to be able to read my favorite bits at any time. I don’t keep those places marked. Instead, I either flip to them based on where the book’s spine opens best (this happens with my best-loved books, even though I try not to abuse my books), or I flip to them based on some kind of tactile memory. I don’t get that with my e-books so, although I read a lot of e-books one time through, I rarely go back and re-read my favorite parts, even though that’s something I do regularly with my print books. This isn’t a deal-breaker for me – I still buy and read lots of e-books – but it does mean I can’t say that reading e-books and reading paper books are equivalent, at least not for me.
@MaryK: I have an 8 year old with ADHD and the same thing is true for him. I can get him to read a much longer book on the Kindle what I can in paper. In paper he looks at it, looks at the print size and declares it “too hard”. If I hand it to him on the Kindle he just starts reading because that bias isn’t there.
@romsfuulynn: I do the same thing. I *love* the dictionary function. The lack of an integrated dictionary is one of the big drawbacks of paper books for me. I do still like the tactile sensation of turning paper pages, though. Both formats have their pluses and minuses.
I’ve been biting my fingernails since I opted to convert but have never gotten the “here’s your code” email. (Called to check twice & got “it’s coming”).
I was going to download one of my new books to read (Lynn viehl’s new one) and my Nook first edition was acting a little squirrelly. So I went to my Kindle app on my phone and watched in awe as books came pouring in. The android app doesn’t do counts, but I think about 1450 came across (989 plus 589 were my fictionwise and ereader totals.) That was a manual count on a tiny screen.
But I was very happy to see so many old friends!!!! (I can’t get into the account on the website through Windows and the 1st edition still isn’t seeing them.
What’s interesting is that I never did get a code. However, my email is the same on all three accounts so that works.
My fictionwise code from b&n came today (finally!) and I was pleasantly surprised that they converted MSReader (!) files that I actually lost way back when HarperCollins pulled all of its titles from fictionwise overnight with the rise of agency pricing (!). But, I’m curious if anyone else is having this problem: a few of the titles transferred are not the right book. E.g., Janet Evanovich’s “Manhunt” is opening on B&N as James L. Swanson’s “Manhunt.”