by Frank McPherson, author of How To Do Everything With Windows Mobile

 
I just read over on Pocket PC Thoughts that FictionWise has aquired eReader from Motricity. eReader has a long history, originally starting as Peanut Press. It was aquired by Palm and renamed Palm Digital Media (at the time Palm did not sell Windows Mobile devices) and later renamed to eReader and sold to Motricity.

(Here is an interesting tidbit. I believe even to this day the books you buy from eReader are in an encrypted version of the Palm database format, indicated by the *.pdb file extension. If you aren't familiar with Palm, in the earlier days all the files on Palm were stored in the PDB format so eReader's file format shows their original roots of first being available for Palm OS handhelds.)

Next to Audible.com, eReader may well be the most popular electronic book publishing firm, and their success is due in large part to a straightforward DRM implementation that allows for moving ebooks to difference devices. The books that you buy are encrypted using the credit card number that they were purchased with as the key, and you can share books so long as you are willing to share your credit card number. They keep an electronic bookshelf of all the books you purchase, and you can download them at any time. If you change credit cards it is pretty simply to enter a new credit card and have new encrypted copies of the book generated, though of course you would need to download them to your device again.

Over the years I have probably spent a couple hundred books or more on books from eReader. Next to eWallet, it is probably the second application that I install on any new Pocket PC that I get. When I learn of a book that I am interested reading I check eReader first and either buy it or put it on my wishlist. Ed Hansberry thinks FictionWise, who has been selling ebooks on their own for some time. I don't know whether FictionWise's catalog overlaps with eReaders or is the same, but if they have titles originally not available that will be a bonus. My fear is that the continued reselling of eReader is an indication that the ebook market really hasn't matured, hopefully time will prove my fears wrong.

Labels: 2008, ebooks

posted by Frank at 9:20 AM

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