The short answer is: eBooks.com is independently owned by its founders and its staff.
The company is privately held and remains under the direction of Stephen and Trudy Cole, who founded the business in the late 1990s and launched eBooks.com in September 2000. Twenty per cent of the shares in the company are owned by members of our staff.
We are not owned by Amazon, Apple, Google, a publishing conglomerate, a private-equity fund or a large technology company. There is no parent corporation sitting behind eBooks.com. More than 25 years after our launch, we remain an independent bookseller, with a significant part of the company owned by the people who work in it.
Independent since 2000
eBooks.com was created at a time when the ebook industry barely existed. The company began building its technology and establishing relationships with publishers years before ebooks became a mainstream part of the book trade. Since then, the industry around us has changed enormously. Companies have appeared and disappeared, formats and reading devices have come and gone, and much of digital bookselling has become concentrated in the hands of a small number of very large technology companies.
We remain independent, privately held and focused on books. Today we sell ebooks to readers around the world through local stores serving the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. Our catalogue contains millions of titles from publishers large and small, covering everything from bestselling fiction and general non-fiction to academic, professional and specialist books.
We’ve built our own reading platform
Over the years our small team has built all of the key infrastructure required to operate a global ebook business. We maintain our own relationships and licences with publishers, our own ebook repository and delivery systems, and our own reading technology. Customers can read books in our browser-based Online Reader, use the eBooks.com mobile apps on iOS and Android, or, where the publisher permits it, download books for offline reading using compatible desktop software like Thorium Reader.
We believe buying an ebook should not lock you unnecessarily into a single device or proprietary ecosystem. With that in mind, we have undertaken a major renewal of our reading platform, with a particular emphasis on accessibility, reliability, open standards and giving readers sensible choices about how and where they read.
A small company with a remarkable amount of experience
Although eBooks.com operates internationally, the company itself is small.
Many members of our team have worked together for 20 years or more. During that time they have accumulated an extraordinary amount of specialist knowledge: not only in software engineering and digital publishing, but in bookselling, metadata, accessibility, publisher systems, ebook formats, digital rights management and the thousands of small details required to deliver books reliably to readers around the world.
That continuity is one of the company’s greatest assets.
The people who built eBooks.com are, to a remarkable extent, still the people running it today. And most of us are shareholders as well as employees. We’re proud of that.
More than a retail bookstore
Selling ebooks directly to readers remains at the heart of what we do, but eBooks.com has also developed a range of services for book publishers. These grew naturally out of the technology and expertise we developed to operate our own bookstore.
Ebook Collections helps publishers sell curated collections of ebooks directly to institutions. It provides another route to market for publishers with academic, professional and specialist lists, while allowing institutions to acquire groups of relevant titles in a straightforward way.
Digital Comps enables publishers to distribute secure complimentary ebook copies to reviewers, academics, instructors and other professional readers. Instead of shipping physical review copies, publishers send ebooks securely and immediately to recipients around the world.
Ebook Engine enables publishers and other organisations to sell ebooks directly to consumers from their own websites while using our underlying ecommerce, fulfilment and delivery infrastructure.
Ebook Campaigns gives publishers a way to create dedicated promotional ebook campaigns for particular audiences, titles or groups of titles. The service can be used for marketing, sampling, professional distribution and other targeted initiatives where a publisher wants to place ebooks directly into the hands of readers.
So, eBooks.com is not simply an ebook retailer. We are also a technology and distribution partner for publishers, leveraging the infrastructure we have developed over more than two decades in digital bookselling.
Independence matters to us
Independence influences the way we run the company.
We are able to make decisions with a long-term view rather than according to the demands of quarterly results or the priorities of a parent corporation or outside investors. We can support open standards even when proprietary systems might offer a short-term commercial advantage. We can invest in accessibility because we think it is important. And we can concentrate on building a good bookstore and reading platform rather than trying to draw customers into a larger technology ecosystem.
We are certainly much smaller than our competitors who dominate ebook retailing. We regard that as a strength.
There are real people behind eBooks.com. Many of them have devoted a substantial part of their working lives to the company. Together we are building something that has survived for more than a quarter of a century in one of the most rapidly changing parts of the book industry.
So, who owns eBooks.com? We do.
