Books on Board Shuttering

Books on Board, one of the few independent e-book retailers, is closing up shop. The site remains open for people who purchased e-books to download their purchases and then will likely cease operations entirely.

BoB was a victim of several things, among them the agency pricing conspiracy of 2011 which shut them out of being able to retail major publishers' titles entirely and then when that was broken up they suffered from not having the deep pockets to compete against outlets like Amazon that have the ability to offer deep discounts (and take losses) despite publishers' insistence on keeping e-book prices ridiculously high.

It's possible that Books on Board will find new financing to handle its debt problems and remain in business somehow, but I'm not hopeful. Until we break the DRM lock-ins and hardware dependencies that are endemic to the ebook business right now there's just not a lot of breathing room for people who aren't making hardware onto which the books can be locked.