Quote:
Originally Posted by doreenjoy
Ebooks have been dominated by female readers since day one.
Case in point, Fictionwise started out selling science fiction (which mainly appeals to men), but when they began to resell books by erotic romance publishers, that was when their sales skyrocketed.
E-reading on a dedicated device might have been male-dominated in the early days, but women have been purchasing ebooks in huge numbers since the beginning.
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Ebooks have been around since well before dedicated devices.
The first dedicated ebook publisher I recall was Peanut Press. They targeted the then popular Palm PDA platform, with a reader program called Peanut Reader and a markup language called PML that allowed color, text attributes, embedded images, hyperlinks and (on Palm OS 5 devices) custom fonts. They actively negotiated the rights to produce electronic editions of current books with the respective publishers.
Palm bought them and made them the Palm Digital Media division, and renamed the reader program PalmReader. It was bundled free with most Palm OS devices. Palm sold the division to B2B mobile communications solution provider Motricity, who called it eReader. They let it languish, using it mostly as an example of the sort of solutions they could provide, and the ebook catalog grew increasingly stale.
Fictionwise bought it from Motricity, and Fictionwise was in turn acquired by B&N. The eReader.com site still exists, and there's a fair bit of content in PML format out there. The reader has been ported to Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, Android, Windows, Mac OS/X, Linux, OQO, and iPhone/iPad, and is supported as a legacy format by the nook reader.
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Dennis