New Initiatives Push E-Publishing to the Fore
Calvin Reid, Jim Milliot &Gayle Feldman -- 5/29/00
Time Warner forms in-house online venture, while
Microsoft partners with Random and S&S to promote e-books
In separate press conferences held 30 minutes apart last Tuesday, May 23, the Time Warner Trade Publishing Group announced plans for a major new electronic publishing initiative, while Microsoft announced it has partnered with Random House, Simon & Schuster and Barnes&Noble.com to make Michael Crichton's Timeline as well as 15 Star Trek titles available as free e-books.
In what could be a model for a publisher of the future, Time Warner Trade Publishing is launching iPublish.com at Time Warner Books, an online publishing venture that will enlist a Web community of readers and writers, along with TWTP's editorial expertise, to publish new and established writers in a variety of e-book formats and in traditional print. TWTP will also sell new e-content directly through iPublish.com, as well as through the usual online retailers. The iPublish.com Web site will not be fully operational until early 2001, but TWTP will initiate the venture by making all of its frontlist and backlist titles available in every e-book format by the end of the year.
Laurence Kirshbaum, chairman of TWTP, jokingly said that while the new venture would "nudge Mr. Gutenberg off center stage," electronic publishing will also "broaden the scope and bring new appreciation to the printed word," while also allowing the publisher to experiment with shorter forms of prose, online writing communities and "interactive and dynamic" forms of electronic publishing. Among iPublish.com's partners are Microsoft, AOL, b&n.com, Amazon. com, netLibrary, Ingram and Fatbrain.com.
IPublish.com will have its own staff, including about five editors and another 10 people devoted to marketing and technical support. Gregory Voynow, currently v-p and director of online marketing and development, will become senior v-p and general manager of iPublish.com. Claire Zion, most recently director of Warner's mass market publishing, has been named editorial director. Margo Spinar has been named manager, strategic planning and operations; Hilary Lifton, previously with Barnes & Noble, has been named director of electronic business development; and Roger Cooper, formerly with Doubleday Direct, has been appointed as consultant to editorial strategic alliances.
Voynow emphasized that iPublish.com is "more than bringing print books to the Web or just online promotion." To start things off, TWTP will begin releasing a variety of e-book originals (including promotional excerpts)--by authors David Baldacci, Sandra Brown, Walter Mosley and David Foster Wallace--in addition to business and health titles. The iPublish.com site will launch early next year. The site will include three prominent sections: iRead will feature published e-titles and offer them for sale through the site and through other online retailers; iWrite will solicit writers to submit and showcase their works and appeal to visitors to the site for commentary and feedback; and iLearn will be a forum for published authors and iPublish.com editors to offer information and their writing and publishing experience to visitors (both new writers and readers) to the site. The site will also feature works in progress and solicit feedback.
Voynow told PW the site will "cultivate talent and public input," adding that it will essentially function as an online "test market" for new writers. Zion predicts that the site will generate hundreds of new titles and that it will "enhance every aspect of the publisher's role. In the past, we've been dictators of taste, with no research." But she emphasized that the site will "be a community, not a slush pile. It will not be vanity publishing." She continued, "We'll get immediate feedback from readers and editors, and we'll publish--some as e-books, some in print--what we hear is popular." Submissions to iWrite must be exclusive, and accepted manuscripts will be published under short-term digital rights licenses. TWTP has e-rights to most of its backlist, but will have to renegotiate in some instances. Zion said agents have been supportive of the venture.
Kirshbaum said e-book editions of hard and softcover titles will be priced about the same, with "some discount off the full price. Pricing is still a work in progress." He also noted that there's a chance to "aggregate the content of other publishers."
While selling e-books directly through the site might be controversial, Kirshbaum believes it's the only way to build the distribution of e-books. Kirshbaum noted that he expects the venture to "speed up the publishing timetable. Most nonfiction books are out of date by the time the book is published. This venture has the potential to make the book an open, living, dynamic document."
Microsoft Promotion
Under its agreements with Random and S&S, Microsoft is making Timeline and 15 Star Trek titles available as e-books exclusively through devices that use the Microsoft Reader and ClearType software. The titles can be downloaded only through Barnes&Noble.com. Currently, Microsoft Reader is pre-installed on Pocket PC devices from Hewlett-Packard and Casio, and a third device featuring the software is due from Compaq later this year. Later this summer, a version of Microsoft Reader for desktop and laptop PCs will be available via Internet download. For a limited time, owners of Pocket PCs can download free copies of the 16 e-books through www.bn.com/pocketpc. Microsoft said the creation of a new Microsoft Reader section on bn.com is part of its agreement with the e-retailer to build an e-book superstore on the e-retailer's site.
Dick Brass, v-p of technology development at Microsoft, was noncommittal when asked if the titles will be available through sites other than bn.com. Brass did say the deals with Random and S&S are a promotion aimed at drawing attention to e-books in general and to titles that are compatible with Microsoft software in particular. Brass maintained that if the book industry is to avoid the sort of piracy problems that are currently plaguing the music business, companies "should flood the market with affordable titles" that have the best encryption protection possible; titles in this promotion will use ContentGuard.
Microsoft is paying Random and S&S for participating in the promotion, and the two publishers have made their own arrangements to compensate their authors. Both Erik Engstrom, president and chief operating officer of Random, and Kate Tentler, v-p and publisher of S&S Online, told PW they do not expect the sale of e-books to cannibalize print sales. "This is another way to get books to our customers," Tentler explained, and Engstrom concurred that it is unlikely e-books will replace printed editions.
A number of parties used the press conference to speculate on the future of e-books. Brass and Steve Riggio, bn.com's vice-chairman, agreed that it is only a matter of time, perhaps five to 10 years, before all books will be available in both digital and print formats. Riggio observed that by creating an e-superstore, bn.com is moving from solely being in the e-commerce business toward also being in digital commerce, as the company transmits content itself. Although the lines between authors, publishers and retailers are blurring in the digital age, Crichton speculated that 20 years from now, he will probably still use a publisher to release his books, because "I don't like being a businessman."
Back To News
---> |
