in the April issue, I discussed Donald Hawkins' two-part ONLINE 24:4 and 24:5 ebooks survey and updated the state of three players in that field. Hawkins' second article discussed many more "Ebook Market Players" (his term) besides NuvoMedia, SoftBook, EveryBook, and Fatbrain/Mighty Words--eleven in the text, another ten noted in a table. Hawkins completed his articles in April 2000. I spent April 22, 2001 looking at (or for) the Web sites of the companies to see how they're doing a year later. I won't claim that the ebook scene is a tragic wasteland littered with corporate corpses; the truth is nowhere near that negative. But comparisons don't suggest a thriving marketplace, much less an exploding one. I'll use Hawkins' categories for companies, with a brief version of what he found last year followed by what I could find this year. All quotes come from Hawkins' September 2000 article. DOWNLOADABLE EBOOK DATABASES Glassbook, Inc. "delivers ebook reading software to users' PCs and offers a collection of ebooks for sale from its Web site." Glassbook is now part of Adobe, which offers the software as Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader 2.0. Librius.com, Inc. "operates an ebookstore delivering titles for reading on handheld devices running the Palm Pilot and Windows CE operating system." I was unable to locate either Librius or Books2Read (its "bookstore" affiliate) in April 2001--or, for that matter, in November 2000. Dead. Project Gutenberg specializes in public domain texts formatted in the worst possible way (plain ASCII, 70 characters per line with carriage returns at the end of each line). PG's goal was 10,000 texts by 2001. There were just over 3,000 textsin April 2000; there are just over 3,400 in April 2001. Short of reissuing each book as separate chapters, it's fair to say that the goal will not be reached.
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