Gemstar shuts down eBooknet.com

This week the ebook community is mourning the loss of eBooknet.com. Glenn Sanders launched the site in 1997. It was later acquired by Nuvomedia. When Nuvomedia was purchased by Gemstar in 2000 it became their property. Glenn Sanders was joined later by Wade Roush, together they made eBooknet.com the premier site for information and news about electronic publishing. The site was a "device neutral" area for information about all types of handheld reading devices. Perhaps this was part of the reason for Gemstar shutting it down. Glenn and Wade told it like it was ,with no preference for any particular device. One can only assume that Gemstar didn't like the site recommending other devices once it began producing the new series of Rocket Readers. Wade Roush told Publisher's Weekly that Gemstar didn't know how to fit the website into a marketing plan. Well, especially a website that wasn't going to promote their product over all others. eBooknet.com was independent right up to the end.

This is just another example of large corporations wanting to be publishers and not knowing that their clients aren't necessarily the empty headed, easily lead, morons that they are used to dealing with in every other media environment (Gemstar is primarily a TV guide company). eBooknet.com was a well respected source for information. It was regularly cited in Publisher's Weekly, Inside.com and many other magazines and sources for information about electronic publishing. Gemstar is, to quote Jamie Engle of eBC's ePub Market Update, "here for the buck$, not for the love of books."

Gemstar is a control freak. It tried to copyright "ebook", its new devices are made to allow only their books to be used on them, and you can not even put your own information on them anymore as you could with the earlier models. I believe the reading public will not forget what Gemstar has done and why it has done it. How is Gemstar going to keep its self in the public eye without a premier website like eBooknet.com? Maybe with the million dollar advertising campaign that was promised when it bought NuvoMedia? Or did it already do that and we all missed it. And wasn't it B&N chairman Stephen Riggio, that said at last year's Book Expo that Gemstar would put millions of Readers in the market place "even if they had to give them away"? Anyone received their free Rocket Reader yet?

With the number of different platforms available for ebooks, it becomes more and more difficult for the public to make up its mind what kind of reader it is going to buy, if they buy at all. Eventually, the field will narrow and the choices will begin to decline. Nuvomedia and their RocketBook Reader were one of the first out of the gate, but with the direction and leadership supplied by Gemstar, I predict they will be running a poor fourth behind Microsoft, Glassbook, and Palmreader. All the devices that operate these platforms are in the same price range, being more that $300, but they all allow the owner to do something else besides read, while REB's only let you read and then only books on the Rocket platform. Where is the value?

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