Bilbary eBookstore Now Live
The hot new ebook rental site Bilbary launched an open beta today, only you won’t find ebook rentals anywhere.
What you’ll find when you visit the site is another ebookstore. It’s launching (in the US and UK markets) with 320 thousand titles from about 2,300 publishers. Over the next month or so Bilbary will expand and add around 100k titles from agency publishers as well as 150,000 ebooks from publishers outside the US. By early May Bilbary plans to finish the roll out by adding around 80 thousand self-published and out-of-print titles.
The ebooks are available in Epub and Bilbary is currently working on a browser based reading app as well as apps for Android, iOS.
When Bilbary was first announced last December, it was pitched as a rental service. That didn’t come to past, unfortunately, because publishers simply didn’t warm to the idea (except for the ones who have signed with Afictionado or launched Skoobe). They much preferred to sell ebooks, not rent them.
This means Bilbary is really not much more than just another ebookstore, so you have to wonder why so many publishers signed up (including 7 of the Big 8). I can explain it in one word: analytics. Bilbary is going to share data about their customers with publishers. This could range from something as simple as the number of pages read to more complex details.
Bilbaary is also planning to expand into more markets and add some ebook rentals later this year, but those will mainly come from academic publishers. Rental selection will probably be similar to that found in the Kindle Store and elsewhere (textbooks, mainly).
Comments
Sturmund Drang March 20, 2012 um 7:34 pm
Ahm… At the risk of really turning everyone off with sarcasm…
This is exactly what we of the intelligentsia have been waiting for, an ebook store that will sell us copies of Huckelberry Finn and Pride and Prejudice for just over 6 dollars. With! the added benefit of having our private activities sold to marketers as if we were 10 cent peep shows.
It’s bad enough the people I work with and the readers of The Digital Reader know I’m an idiot without Bilboe making money from letting the rest of the marketdroid world know that.
Fbone March 20, 2012 um 10:06 pm
Fiction titles are mostly romance and erotica. Some prices are actually lower than Amazon … at least temporarily.
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