On Monday, January 31, the New York Times will publish its first e-book, Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy, about the release of last year's WikiLeaks documents. An excerpt from the book’s introductory essay by Bill Keller, the Times's executive editor, is online now and will be published in the New York Times Magazine on January 30. The essay explains how the paper came to publish the documents and why it chose to do so, chronicling the role the paper played in breaking the WikiLeaks story. The Times is only releasing an e-book version and a spokesperson told PW there are no plans for a print book, citing the "speed and modest cost" of releasing the title only as an e-book.
Open Secrets will include, among other items, expanded profiles of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and Bradley Manning, the Army private suspected of being his source, and original essays on what the episode has revealed about American diplomacy and government secrecy. There will be analyses of the documents by NYT correspondents, as well as the full text of all the cables and war logs published on the Times's Web site, in addition to 27 new cables. Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and others have also contributed opinion essays to the e-book.
The $5.99 e-book, done in-house, will be available at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, the Google eBookstore, and Apple's iBookstore. B&N is taking pre-orders for the e-book, which was made available using PubIt!, B&N’s digital publishing platform. In a release, Keller said, "The publication of Open Secrets as an e-book is the latest example of the Times exploiting the creative potential of the Web to deliver the world's best journalism in whatever format readers find most appealing.”
Random House's Crown division is publishing an insider tell-all about WikiLeaks by its former spokesman, Daniel Domscheit-Berg. The book, Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, is scheduled for a February 15 release. Also coming in February from Perseus's PublicAffairs imprint is Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, by a group of British journalists.
