With that kind of a popular response it’s no surprise that Amazon, B&N, and many other retailers got into ebooks. In fact, it was so successful that downloaders inadvertently succeeded in crashing Adobe’s servers. It was reportedly downloaded over 400,000 times in the first 24 hours after it was released on 14 March, making this the first ebook best-seller ever. Riding the Bullet was given away for free on some sites (including B&N, Amazon) and sold for $2.50 on others. At the time he said he was “curious to see what sort of response there is and whether or not this is the future.” Stephen King is well-known for experimenting with new ideas, and in March 2000 he arranged to sell a novella as an ebook. That puts it about 6 months after the launch, and it’s the closest I could get.Īmazon launched that ebookstore in part because the year 2000 was the tail end of the dot-com bubble, and also in part because of a successful ebook promotion that happened earlier in the year. The above screenshot was found via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and dates to April 2001. It offered an FAQ, links to sites where you could download Adobe Reader and the MS Reader app, and other useful info. I’m told it stocked thousands of titles, an impressive accomplishment for the time.

That first ebookstore sold PDF and Microsoft Reader format ebooks – worldwide. It was their 4th ebookstore (at least), and the first one was launched on this date in the year 2000. Many remember 19 November as the day that Amazon launched the Kindle Store in 2007, but that wasn’t their first attempt to sell ebooks.

Amazon ebook