F+W Media, the vertical content company behind, among other things, Digital Book World, and About.com, have partnered to create a new online venture, NetPlaces.com, which pairs F+W’s content and eCommerce engine with the About.com platform.
Chad Phelps, F+W’s executive v-p, eMedia, told PW that, “the about.com team partnered with us to use the content from our Everything series of books to populate the content of the web site. They are using excerpts and full passages from the titles, optimizing for SEO, and categorizing/creating a taxonomy based on the library of approximately 300 Everything titles.”
Phelps said the two companies have a licensing and revenue share agreement, splitting both advertising and eCommerce revenue. NetPlaces.com will drive users to F+W’s online bookstore for book purchases. Phelps also said that while F+W currently only offers its print books directly to consumers through its eCommerse store, the company will begin selling them in ePub and PDF formats later this year.
EDITOR'S NOTE: We previoulsy misreported that F+W does not publish e-books. In fact the company does publish over 1,500 e-book titles, but does not sell them direct-to-consumer at this time, though it will later this year.
