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"Over the past three years there has been a significant decrease in demand for many of the eBook formats that the Fictionwise Websites sell. In contrast, the eBook format supported by Barnes & Noble--ePub--is growing in popularity."
Unspoken: Because B&N dropped all support for other formats, and didn't allow Fictionwise to grow--they haven't been accepting new publishers for over a year, and I'd heard back from one publisher (Wildside) that they'd given up on putting new books out at FW because the process had gotten so tangled it wasn't worth the effort.
Also unspoken: We couldn't be bothered to support the features that made FW successful--Buywise and micropay--so we substituted a gimmick of "Every week there'll be a discount!" guaranteeing that most customers just waited for 40% or more off list price. So of course, revenue has dropped, and rather than admit publicly that that's because of our active suppression of the site's business model, we're going to imply it's because people don't want non-DRM'd mobi ebooks anymore.
Because that format has no widespread commercial appeal, right?
(They also had formatting glitches. I bought one book that the "Kindle" version only had the cover, and the "mobipocket pdb" version had the text, but no cover. I wrote to them about it; never got an answer.)
Damn. I'll miss multiformat ebooks. I'll miss what FW was before B&N bought them out.
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