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Friday, July 13, 2012

Book Depository no longer selling eBooks

UK-based online bookseller the Book Depository is no longer selling ebooks.

From the Australian Bookseller + Publisher

The Book Depository issued a short statement on its website saying that it is ‘no longer selling ebooks’. The statement directed customers who had previously purchased ebooks from the Book Depository to its online Frequently Asked Questions page.

Apparently, you can blame the multiplicity of devices.

According to this blog post by Adventures of a Bookonaut, the Book Depository informed customers last month that it would not be possible to download ebooks from the Book Depository website after 30 June. The bookseller said that it decided to stop selling ebooks as it ‘feel[s] that the customer experience [it was] able to offer was not as good as it should have been’. ‘This is partially driven by complexity in format and the number of differing devices, which we found often led to consumer frustration.’

The experiment, it seems, has lasted less than two years. The Book Depository launched an eBooks catalogue in 2010, which offered an initial 250,000 eBooks to Australian customers.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Silly me. I thought it had more to do with the Book Depository now being owned by Amazon.

World of the Written Word said...

Good lord, I didn't know that! Thanks for pointing it out.