Reciprocal closes its doors

Reciprocal, once among the leaders in the e-book industry has closed its doors. There is the possibility that Microsoft, a share holder, will buy its assets but what MS will do with them, is anyone's guess. Reciprocal was one of the foremost companies offering Digital Rights Management software. It had contacts with a number of large houses, including Random House which sold its titles through Lycos. Reciprocal was one of the few companies that provided all the steps to take a book from inception to finish. The company had some well documented problems: Its initial $80 million of financing had run out, Microsoft had yanked a $10 million bridge loan and revenue from publisher clients was fading.

Random View Books, launching November 13 with 17 titles, is Random House's e-book line specifically for kids, all retailing for $3.99, from authors including Gary Paulsen, Christopher Paul Curtis, Patricia Reilly Giff and Philip Pullman. Teachers and librarians are identified as a big potential market for the line.

Well file this one under the "I told you so" drawer. It seems B&N is going to stop selling Gemstar e-books (RocketBooks)on their web site. B&N has launched their own line of e-books in MS Reader format and quite a few of the public domain titles duplicate each other. People are still directed to the Gemstar site and Gemstar is still available at Powells.com (for now). Complaints about the price of the reader (and the books) have not helped Gemstar's popularity in the e-book community. I'm still waiting for that big ad campaign and my free reader.

Back in March, Barbara Marcus, president of children's publishing at Scholastic, predicted that "pre-teens will drive" the e-book business and that illustrated content and e-book serials would be critical for creating an e-book market.

Scholastic is launching an e-book publishing program next month that will show that Barbara Marcus means what she says. That will be a refreshingly new departure for the e-book industry. Scholastic will begin offering about 20 e-book titles that will also serve as promotional, merchandising and marketing vehicles for the upcoming print editions.

Scholastic is also releasing a new free promotional e-book of "A Time for Courage: The Suffragette Diary of Kathleen Bowen. The new e-book is the latest in a series of free promotional e-book editions of bestselling Scholastic titles, offered to attract young readers to the digital format. "A Time for Courage is an interactive e-book that will offer links to more than 100 web pages of extra content, with audio and graphics embedded in the book.

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