Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Fictionwise is shutting down, back up your purchased books soon!

The old and famous eBook store Ficionwise is shutting down since last Friday.

This site can be dated back to early 2000s, it is one of the most ancient eBook stores in the world and has brought eBooks to many people's world. At that times, it is the most popular eBook store and absolutely ahead of that time.

Then Barnes&Noble bought it in 2009, unlike Facebook bought Instagram and Google bought Sparrow, Fictionwise didn't meet its another peak after purchased by B&N. On the contrary, it fell down with a surprisingly rapid speed.

I can remember the site didn't change its design since 2003 or even earlier, and the customer service is becoming more and more dumb, sometimes even reply customer's email after tens of days.

Finally, in the end of 2012, Fictionwise (or B&N) declared the cease operations.

Okay, let's finish the mourning. R.I.P Fictionwise.

fictionwise shutting down


Now the trouble is coming.

As Fitionwise is not going to offer the service anymore, for those purchased books, if you lost the copy, then you will not be able to download them to your computer any longer. What's worse, which is also I most worry about, will those DRM protected books become not readable?

Barnes&Noble allows users to transfer most of their purchased books to Nook library, but there is a list of Fictionwise titles which are not transferrable. (This list is so long..)

So if you happend to buy some of those books in the list, or you just don't want to have a Nook library, you'd better back up your purchased Fictionwise books before December 21, 2012.

Don't know how to back up?

If your purchased books are marked as "MultiFormat", then you need not to worry about them as they are not encrypted books. You can read them freely no matter Fitionwise is alive or dead.

If you purchased books are marked as "Secure *** Format", then you should keep an eye on them.
For "Secure Adobe Format", this post can help you.
For "Secure eReader Format", please refer to this post.
These two guides require a bit coding skills, if you want to back up your books easily and quickly, please ask a favor to this software, and you can back up all thest two kinds of secure formats with this software.


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