The end is near for small ebook shops everywhere, as one of the most long lived ones has just closed up shop. Books on Board announced today that new purchases can no longer be made and customers are encouraged to download all of the content from the website.
In a note to members of the Books on Board website, the company reps said “BooksOnBoard has temporarily stopped selling books. We are re-structuring to compete more effectively against Goliaths who have entered our marketplace since we first launched in 2006, i.e., Amazon, Apple, Google, Sony and Barnes & Noble.
We expect to be back with our new business model soon. Meanwhile, customers can continue to download their prior purchases as long as the publisher and their distributors continue to make them available – same as always and out of our control. As in the past, it’s always wise to download your ebooks as soon as possible after purchase.”
Books on Board has been selling ebooks since 2006 with LIT, MOBI and EPUB titles. The company focused mainly on romance novels and landed a number of exclusives over the years. It basically had the same mainstream titles that Amazon, Kobo, and Google has, minus the self-published titles. The main interface was tremendously outdated and really felt like a WEB 1.0 type of site. It remains to be seen if the company could recover, but it looks like this is the end.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.