Fictionwise is no longer what it used to be

[thinkpad]

I came about an old article where the founders of Fictionwise shared there vision.
http://www.allbusiness.com/humanitie...2486266-1.html

Fictionwise began getting offers from a number of companies looking to acquire it. Scott says, "We were intrigued by [B&N president] Steve Riggio's vision." The brothers believe Fictionwise should be "platform-neutral, no lockdowns, and we wanted our format everywhere. B&N's vision matched ours and they offered a lot of resources.

Well I guess that vision is long gone seeing how Fictionwise more or less dumped all formats in favour of the secure e-reader format for a large number of the books.

[ATDrake]

Personally, I blame B&N. I doubt their vision was ever much in step with Fictionwise; they probably just wanted to grab the existing tech and customer base and run with them.

Ironically, I've spent the most of my e-book buying dollars on purchases at Fictionwise, despite the rapid downwards spiral, because deep discount coupons (thanks for posting so many in the Deals forum, by the way) combined with MultiFormat (which is still pretty strong for sf/fantasy works) still makes them mostly worth it for me.

Although I wish I could have gotten more stuff and supported them back when they were apparently a much better business.

[sufue]

I wonder if the founders signed a non-compete, and if so, how long it runs...

[thinkpad]

I too feel that B&N wasn't honest when they took over the business and turned it into something the former owners never would have wanted.

[thinkpad]

I see that I'm not the only one thinking about the future of Fictionwise:
http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadow...n-the-way-out/
http://www.geardiary.com/2010/12/21/...d-fictionwise/

Still, it’s hard to look at this and see anything but a repeat of the same old pattern: the parent company might be content to let its new subsidiary continue on as it is for a while with “no interference”, but doesn’t see the point in wasting more resources to let the subsidiary compete with it when the next big thing comes along.

From user-comment after article:

FW has also killed their long time Yahoo group instead telling folks to go to the B&N community site. Not to mention for the past year or more they’ve been horrible about having new releases on time (& CS responses)

Another example of inactivity is there twitter-channel which hasn't had an update since Aug 2010.
https://twitter.com/fictionwise

Trying to contact them through e-mail is another futile business. Do they have any people left working, or is it all automated?

The only indication that they're still alive and active are the weekly newsletters.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Personally, I blame B&N. I doubt their vision was ever much in step with Fictionwise; they probably just wanted to grab the existing tech and customer base and run with them.

Ironically, I've spent the most of my e-book buying dollars on purchases at Fictionwise, despite the rapid downwards spiral, because deep discount coupons (thanks for posting so many in the Deals forum, by the way) combined with MultiFormat (which is still pretty strong for sf/fantasy works) still makes them mostly worth it for me.

Although I wish I could have gotten more stuff and supported them back when they were apparently a much better business.

[rhadin]

I used to buy $30-$50 worth of ebooks at Fictionwise every month. I stopped buying more than a year ago. I don't even look at Fictionwise any more.