Made it easy to distinguish between the corporate tools and my personal toys.) You should recognize that name he’s now a VP at Amazon and the head of Amazon Publishing. But the guy who killed it is another fascinating historical footnote the CEO of TWTP at that time was Larry Kirshbaum. That made some sense they were in a recession and it likely wouldn’t have broken even in 2002. Time Warner Trade Publishing both launched and killed the site in 2001. That sounds a lot like Amazon KDP, B&N PubIt, or Smashwords, doesn’t it? Time Warner Trade Publishing announced around that time that they were going to launch, which was going to “provide authors, publishers and consumers with an interactive Web site for creating and distributing eBooks and other electronically published documents”. The story also mentions one of the very first of the major publishers’ experiments in digital publishing. That book is new to me the only other SF book from that era which really discussed ebooks was Ben Bova’s Cyberbooks. It also mentions a couple historical details I didn’t know, including Michael Crichton’s 1983 book, Electronic Life, in which he predicts the idea of ebooks. It’s fast, it’s easy and, with Microsoft Reader software, it makes reading on-screen as pleasurable as reading on paper.”īut this old story is more than simply amusing.
#How to download books on ipublish reader Pc
“We are happy to be offering Pocket PC customers the opportunity to download these terrific eBooks,” said Steve Riggio, vice chairman of Barnes & “The Pocket PC is a truly remarkable device that offers an unparalleled reading experience. Some of the statements are particularly amusing in retrospect. That partnership didn’t go anywhere, yet everyone was lauding it as the wave of the future. There’s not much to this story, but if you read it you will likely recognize the parallels between then and now. They could only be had through Barnes & Noble and could only be read in the one format, so I’m not sure how many people got them. And Amazon didn’t launch their first ebookstore until the end of the year before going on to sell ebooks in the 4 standard formats (MSReader, Mobipocket, eReader, and Adobe PDF), though they stopped selling ebooks once they settled on building the Kindle platform.īut B&N was selling MSReader ebooks in the year 2000, and as part of the launch Simon & Schuster was giving away a selection of Star Trek ebooks. To put things into perspective, in the year 2000 Sony had just gotten out of their previous ereader endeavor, the Sony Data Discman. That didn’t amount to much, either, though I don’t have definite details on what happened. That was when they sold the RocketBook, their first ereader, in 1999. I only knew of B&N’s first foray into ebooks. I will admit that this story surprised me. To be fair, there weren’t many other formats in commercial use eReader was just getting started and Mobipocket had just incorporated a mere 2 months before B&N opened the ebookstore. This was their first ebookstore, and at the time the only format they sold was MSReader.
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It had fairly high hardware requirements for the time and when this partnership was announced MSReader could only be read on a few PDAs running Windows Mobile.ī&N comes in because they were selling the ebooks. This format, which is scheduled to be killed off this year, was the most sophisticated ebook format on the market. While lots of tech bloggers are talking about the glorious future these companies have before them, I think it useful to look at where they were.īack in the year 2k, Microsoft was just releasing its new ebook format, MSReader. I thought it would be interesting to take a historical look at what came of that partnership. I just found a link on a Facebook group which led to an old, old, old story from the very first time that B&N offered ebooks. The new partnership between Microsoft and Barnes & Noble is hot news right now,but it’s not the first time these 2 companies worked together.