Saturday
Apr172010
Fictionwise eReader Not Supporting iPad
I recently wrote the following to Customer Support at Fictionwise:
I'm a longtime customer of Fictionwise and I recently bought an iPad. All my ebooks from Fictionwise, however, are in the "recommended format" e.g. Secure eReader, but reading these ebooks on my iPad means I either have to read them iPhone size (too small for the iPad screen) OR blurry (increased to fill the size of the iPad screen).
Do you plan to develop an iPad version of eReader? If not, I regret that I'm not going to be making any further purchases from Fictionwise.
Debbie Ridpath Ohi
Their reply:
Hi,
Currently at this time, there are no plans to update the iPhone eReader app for iPad.
Thanks!
Best Regards,
Linda
Fictionwise Support Team
Not happy about this, nor with Fictionwise's uninformative form letter response.
Saturday, April 17, 2010 at 10:13 AM
Reader Comments (10)
it's a barnes & noble company, the people with their own ereader (the nook), trying to play the amazon game. i imagine they're going to entrench themselves against ipad until they either give in or give up.
having once worked for b&n i can tell you: they rarely, if ever, are early adopters of any trend, and have a history of bad decisions behind them - which is why the have half as many stores as they did ten years ago, and half the sales online, and dropping.
Unfortunately though they are a nice company and have a ton of books, their customer service department has always left much to be desired.
Back when I upgraded PC's and changed to Vista, I realized the Librarian program no longer worked (which I needed desperately as I read a lot on the eBookWise reader for judging and would upload rtf docs.). When I asked about upgrades or needing help, I got the same kind of canned response.
I don't know what their CS load is, but this won't help them one bit either.
What a very offhand reply.
And the worst part of it is that they used "currently" and "at this time" in the same sentence. How redundant of them.
Well, that helps me decide not to get THEIR reader.
All if which makes several important points:
1) Do not buy anything that uses DRM/TPM, for reference three articles I wrote trashing a presentation given by James Gannon where he claimed that DRM/TPM were good for consumers! http://madhatter.ca/2010/04/06/james-gannon-presentation-copyright-viewed-by-a-lawyer-correct-legally-but-wrong-part-1/" rel="nofollow">Number 1, http://madhatter.ca/2010/04/07/james-gannon-presentation-copyright-viewed-by-a-lawyer-correct-legally-but-wrong-part-2/" rel="nofollow">Number 2,
http://madhatter.ca/2010/04/08/james-gannon-presentation-–-copyright-viewed-by-a-lawyer-–-correct-legally-but-wrong-–-part-3/" rel="nofollow">Number 3.
2) Caveat Emptor is a nasty concept, but obviously applies in this case. B&N has just told you they don't value your business. If they don't value your business, you shouldn't value their store, and refer people to other stores, like Indigo (I will NOT refer anyone to the thieves at Amazon - if you are curious you can read why on my site).
3) This points to the need for open standards. If the files were in ODT format, you wouldn't be locked into any particular reader, anyone would be able to produce a reader for you.
4) This is the sort of thing that the Free Software Foundation, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been warning people about for years. You should send Corey Doctorow an email about it, he's very interested in this sort of thing (being an EFF member). If you want I could send something along to Glyn Moody, Glyn writes for ComputerWorld UK, and we've traded emails in the past.
Wayne
More fool they - anyone who can't see that the iPad is due to become a major ebook reading platform is just throwing business away, own technology/plsatform or not. Meh - I'm sorry to hear of the problems you're encountering getting your e-books over onto the iPad.
Apparently Barnes & Noble's version of eReader will be ported, though, and (with a little work) you can load your old Fictionwise and eReader.com purchases into it. (I'm not surprised, really; they added ePub support to the B&N version but not the Fictionwise/eReader.com version...making me think that the latter is dead-ending.)
The trick: put your files on a webserver somewhere (Mac OS X's Personal Web Sharing will do nicely) and then make a page of links to them, except start the URLs with bnereader:// instead of http://.
Then click on them in Mobile Safari; they'll be loaded into the B&N eReader app.
The BNereader was just released today. They compleatly rebuilt the software from the ground up and it DOES NOT support sideloading of Fictionwise/eReader ebooks.
Which sucks. And as far as I am concerned they are not getting my business now. I have over two hundred ebooks between Fictionwise and eReader.
Folks, I'm writing another article on DRM, and you've all posted some really good information. Would anyone mind if I used the information? I can give attribution if you wish, or leave your name out.
Wayne
Feel free.
Oh, and word from Barnes and Noble is they currently have no plans to support the import of drm protected eReader or Fictionwise ebooks.