Let's take a look at what's happened to the ebook market players of 2000: it's not a pretty picture. "Tracking the eBook Vendors" appeared in the August 2001 EContent, following up on 24 "ebook market players" mentioned by Don Hawkins in two 2000 Online articles on ebooks.

Ten firms disappeared including Librius, Tara Books, NuvoMedia, SoftBook, Fatbrain/MightyWords, and Searchlight E-book Training. BiblioBytes, a self-publishing platform with 377 books (all free, readable only onscreen) appeared defunct in 2001. Netbooks became WordPop.com by 2001 and disappeared late that year. Spirit Virtual Books, a firm believer that print books would be relegated to collector status, was moribund in 2001 and has since disappeared. ZeroHour, a French PDF-based epublisher, suffered the same fate. 

Three were absorbed or have a shadowy existence. NightKitchen offered TK3 authoring and reading software for multimedia ebooks. The site's still there, but the copyright date etc., suggest it hasn't been touched since 2001. Glassbook was absorbed into Adobe by 2001; its product, renamed Acrobat eBook Reader, has since been absorbed into Adobe Reader. MetaText, Inc., became a division of netLibrary by 2001, then went to ProQuest. The site doesn't appear to have any post-2002 content among its 250-odd books. ProQuest's main site doesn't mention MetaText. 

Three firms are hard to gauge: EText Station, offering free software to enhance Project Gutenberg texts, is still around as software—but www.etextstation.com is now a link page for "ebook resources." iBooks.com shut down in March 2001 and Simon & Schuster took the name iBooks for its simultaneous ebook/print-book initiative. The site doesn't appear to have been updated since mid-2004 and has just over 100 books in its catalog. Universal Publishers has a live site with a $495 up-front fee, and does nonfiction print on demand (PoD) paperbacks and ebooks with 20% to 40% royalties ($9 price, first 25 pages free), listing 704 titles. The last copyright date is 2004, but books are still available, and its bestseller is within Amazon's top 50,000. 

Eight firms, one-third of the original 24, seem to be active. Bartleby.com has "more than 370,000 web pages," with a collection small enough to browse in one (long) web page. Books24x7 offers Referenceware as "the largest online book resource offering unobstructed access to the complete unabridged content of thousands of the latest and best business and technology books." With roughly 10,000 titles, the price has gone from $299 per year in 2001 to $459 in 2006. Now part of OCLC, NetLibrary boasts more than 100,000 titles and hundreds of e-audiobooks. Project Gutenberg's goal was 10,000 texts by 2001. While the 2001 goal wasn't reached until some time in 2004, PG is a success story, and now offers more than vanilla ASCII in thousands of cases.  

Four others are still around—but only two are fundamentally publishers and only one deals exclusively in ebooks, while one of the largest has abandoned them entirely in favor of PoD: OnlineOriginals was waning in 2001 despite a claim that the market was "about to explode." The current site tells a fascinating story. Restarted in 2002, it's now a very small operation offering non-DRM PDF or PDA downloads (£6) for its 72 books (to date). Authors pay an up-front review fee but no other fees. This seems to be the purest ebook play of the group.

Book Locker calls itself "a print-on-demand and ebook publishing services company." It pays royalties rather than net proceeds, but PoD prices are fixed: royalties on ebooks, priced $8.95 and up, are 70%, and the site is clear about outsourcing everything and not promising too much. There's a great page on why you might not want to use Book Locker, like costs: nominal $217 setup for PoD (including ISBN), or $392 including cover design, and $18 per year for ebook hosting and sales. Book Locker reviews manuscripts before agreeing to provide its services and has about 700 authors under contract.

Xlibris also calls itself a publishing services provider, charging various prices ($500 and up, including ISBN and EAN). Like Book Locker, Xlibris uses Lightning Source for PoD and Ingram for fulfillment, sets fixed prices for paper and hardbacks based on format and page length, and pays 35% royalty. "As of October 1, 2003, Xlibris ceased providing ebooks for sale." The Xlibris bookstore listed just over 13,000 titles at the end of March 2006. 

1st Books became AuthorHouse and claims 27,000 titles by more than 25,000 authors with more than two million printed books, charging $700 or more up front; ebooks are an extra-cost option. It has the feel of a PoD vanity press, given the average of 74 copies per title and sometimes heavy fees. 

So despite a recently reignited interest in ebooks, particularly given the much-hyped Sony Reader, the market has largely floundered. I'll take a look at why in my next column.