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Originally Posted by langshipley
Do we know the "before" number?
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I don't have hard numbers, but in January of 2009, they lost one of the content aggregators that supply them with ebooks, and they negotiated with publishers to allow previously purchased affected eBooks to be substituted with eReader versions. From the
FAQ that Fictionwise put out during that crisis, they wrote:
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Approximately 300,000 eBook units were affected. This is less than 4% of all eBooks sold by Fictionwise.
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Based on that figure, they claim to have had 7,500,000 books for sale. I question that number -- it sounds pretty high to me -- but I'm guessing they were doing some sort of math based on how many of their books were available in multiple formats. Regardless, the number of individual books that are now available for purchase does seem to have dropped by 50-65%. I went through about 6 pages of my bookshelf (out of 29
), and started counting how many are still available for purchase and how many aren't, and about 54% of the books that I own are no longer for sale. So very sad.
Does anyone know why some ebook stores seem to have recovered while others haven't? I mean, I just did a quick search for Nora Roberts (as a very popular author with a large catalog for comparison), and Fictionwise, Books on Board, Diesel Books, and Mobipocket.com each only had 7 - 10 of her books available, but Amazon's Kindle store, Sony's reader store, and Barnes & Noble.com all seem to have pretty much her entire catalog of ebooks available. Is it all about the power of the big names (Amazon, Sony, B&N) vs. the little guys? Do we think that Fictionwise and the rest will ever recover? Since B&N.com seems not to be having any problems, and since they own Fictionwise now, it seems likely to me that Fictionwise will just be phased out.