Fictionwise has shut down!

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by cfrizz

Jon, FW started going downhill long before the agency debacle took place. FW stopped selling agency books before any of us ever heard of it taking place. B&N didn't want the competition from FW especially since FW prices were a lot better than B&N.

IIRC, FW stopped dealing with one of the ebook distributors (Lightning?) about 6 months before the debacle, and might have lost one or two of the agency publishers because of it, but I know I purchased ebooks from Penguin and Macmillan subsidiaries in March 2010 at FW. By time of the debacle, the Nook had been released, and it's clear that B&N was trying to push FW customers to B&N, and the agency pricing gave them the excuse they needed to drop the publishers at FW. FW didn't stop selling Random House until they implemented agency pricing a year later. I suspect that the majority of Nook owners bought their Nook for the OTA/Wifi purchasing, and had never bought anything at FW before or after their Nook purchase, and probably wouldn't have bought from FW because of the sideloading requirement even if it were cheaper.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by ladyplf

I'm curious, did everyone who got the email have an ereader.com account or a fictionwise account? Does anybody have both and have both accounts transfer over to B&N at the same time?

Why does this have to be so complicated? Certain formats that have died can't transfer and can't be downloaded? Right now ebooks are looking like a bad investment. If they really cared about their customers they'd send everyone a backup of their files on dvd or give them cloud access. This hurry up and grab em attitude is stupid.

And how long will B&N be around anyway, I've never shopped at that site and am not about to start now.

I've only received one for my fictionwise account and not my ereader account. Every other company that shut down their proprietary ebook format service basically said download it now or else, unless they got permission from the publishers to format switch. I think Sony's about the only one to do the format switch so far, and it seems like B&N is essentially doing a format switch if you're a US or UK customer.

While B&N is a troubled company, they've got about 20% of the US ereader market and some sort of partnership with Microsoft, so I think the ereader company will survive even if B&N the retail bricks and mortar bookseller does not.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by cromag

but when I clean an Amazon file I almost always get some words lost here and there.

This should only ever happen with Topaz format Amazon ebooks, because with them the 'cleaned' book is actually the OCR text.

If you're getting corrupted words with a Mobipocket format Amazon book, you might be using an ancient version of the tools that sometimes gets the trailing characters between text blocks wrong.

[cromag]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

How do you find out there are occasional words missing??

I stumbled over a "broken phrase" on my ereader and checked it against K4PC.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

...
If you're getting corrupted words with a Mobipocket format Amazon book, you might be using an ancient version of the tools that sometimes gets the trailing characters between text blocks wrong.

I figured it was due to text blocks having a problem. I'm using the most recent tools I could find. Anyway, it's a minor problem and I don't buy very much (at all) at Amazon. (Shouldn't that bother you guys, Amazon?)

[Purple Lady]

i just tried to bulk download my books and had a bunch that the readme file said couldn't be downloaded because they were not available in the format selected. I only have 59 books, so I looked at each page and there were some that were marked as unable to bulk download. The ones marked as unable to download didn't bulk download, but there were eleven more that didn't download either. The eleven that didn't download were secure ereader and secure epub, but I had other secure ereader books that did download.

If you do a bulk download, you better check that they did all download. The secure ereader books were supposed to always download but even that didn't work. All the ones that were supposedly unable did download one at a time.

[Marseille]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

If you do a bulk download, you better check that they did all download. The secure ereader books were supposed to always download but even that didn't work. All the ones that were supposedly unable did download one at a time.

Ditto this. I originally was downloading per order. Some of the order zip files contained only half that order. The past orders page didn't include any purchases before 2004. I finally got everything together, but it took some doing. Also don't just trust a directory file count matching your total library count. Make sure there aren't any duplicates in there.

[Xanthe]

Thanks very much for starting this thread. I had forgotten that I had books over there.

[pdurrant]

If you are bulk-downloading your multi-format books from Fictonwise, it's advisable to download in more than one default format. I found that some of my multiformat books were available in Mobipocket but not Kindle-compatible format, and some were available in Kindle-compatible format, but not Mobipocket. I even found one that wasn't available in ePub format.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

If you are bulk-downloading your multi-format books from Fictonwise, it's advisable to download in more than one default format. I found that some of my multiformat books were available in Mobipocket but not Kindle-compatible format, and some were available in Kindle-compatible format, but not Mobipocket. I even found one that wasn't available in ePub format.

And I have one which just contained a cover image and nothing else in Mobi, but was fine in ePub. I'd suggest downloading everything in at least Mobi and ePub.

[pdurrant]

I have finished downloading and checking books. My final tally is:

871 Multiformat (870 as ePubs, 863 as prc, 851 as Kindle mobi)
33 Secure ePubs (+5 undownloadable from acsm file)
46 Secure eReader (+2 undownloadable, USA only)
0 Secure Microsoft (+8 unavailable)
468 Secure Mobipocket (+2 not visible on my bookshelf)
+7 Expired Mobipocket

Total books downloaded: 1418
Books missing/unavailable: 24

I could download all of my Multiformat books. Twenty four of the various secure formats could no longer be downloaded. That's 24 out of 571, just over 4%.

The ones I can't download now I have, of course, got copies of from downloads when I bought them.

[sakura-panda]

I just saw the email but it is dated as from November 16. I'm getting the "Sorry your email doesn't match our records" page. I've always had trouble accessing my Fictionwise account and stopped using it a long time ago because of that. I do know that I have already downloaded my few books, but it would have been nice to have the accessible as NOOK books too.

[GreenMonkey]

I got the same email address error. I just started using Fictionwise a few months ago (for DRM-free/discounted epubs). I only have a handful of titles (I think 4-5).

It would be nice to transfer the books to my nook account, but then again, I have them backed up in Calibre also. Need to re-backup my Calibre library again this weekend (haven't done it in a few months).

I'll try again next week. It would be annoying to have to call B&N support for this.

[curtw]

Originally Posted by GreenMonkey

...It would be annoying to have to call B&N support for this.

Actually, this is what I hope is helping. I called B&N support on Friday, and they said they would need 24 hours to transfer the remainder of my library. Nothing happened. So, when the B&N "customer satisfaction survey" e-mail arrived yesterday,I used that opportunity to remind them that they still need to be working on this.

[junkml]

Originally Posted by curtw

Actually, this is what I hope is helping. I called B&N support on Friday, and they said they would need 24 hours to transfer the remainder of my library. Nothing happened. So, when the B&N "customer satisfaction survey" e-mail arrived yesterday,I used that opportunity to remind them that they still need to be working on this.

I also called B&N about this on Friday. They told me they were having more volume than they expected (really, they own Fictionwise and had no idea how many books people had?) and to give it a week to complete the transfer. So far, there are still only the original 22 books that transferred for me. The other 200 are still MIA.

[pdurrant]

I have just checked the "Secure Mobipocket" books that I've just downloaded from Fictionwise.

Thirteen of them were not encrypted!
The unencrypted titles were:
A War of Gifts, By Heresies Distressed, By Schism Rent Asunder, Destroyer of Worlds, Escape from Hell, Fleet of Worlds, Heavy Planet, Inferno, Off Armageddon Reef, Ragamuffin, Scatterbrain, The Android's Dream and The Last Colony

All TOR books as far as I can see. It's very nice to find that Tor's rejection of DRM also applies to previously purchased books.