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Epublishing: Rosetta Books to Bloom by Spring
Calvin Reid -- 2/5/01
A publishing veteran looks to the backlist for quality e-books



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Oldies but goodies:
Quality backlist e-books.
Focusing on acquiring the electronic rights to quality backlist titles and offering advances and extensive online marketing and distribution, a group led by a 25-year book publishing veteran is planning to launch Rosetta Books, a backlist e-publisher and retailing site, by this spring.
Led by Arthur Klebanoff, an agent and owner of Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Rosetta Books is looking to stockpile "the best backlist titles of the 20th century," modern classics published prior to 1985 whose electronic rights likely still belong to the authors. Klebanoff's partners are Rafael Pastor and Marshall Sonenshine, chairman and vice-chairman, respectively, of Sonenshine Pastor & Co. LLC, a New York-based merchant banking firm.

The site, available in preview form at www.rosettabooks.com, will offer e-book editions of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, William Styron's Sophie's Choice, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and a 1953 short story by Ray Bradbury, to name just a few of the notable authors and books that will be offered. The site has also announced an agreement with bn.com to promote both Rosetta Books and Adobe Acrobat's newly upgraded e-book format. Bn.com will e-mail three million customers promotional materials featuring Rosetta Books, the new Acrobat e-book format and the Bradbury story.

RB e-books are priced at $9, although Klebanoff said some titles may be priced higher. The site currently has about 100 titles under contract and is in negotiations for about 500 more. RB e-books are offered in all formats, and Reciprocal will provide digital rights management.

Klebanoff told PW that he's after the "top of the pyramid, probably about 20,000 titles or more that will be very attractive for republishing. The backlist is attractive, the rights are available and trade print publishers don't really focus on their backlists. We're going to make Rosetta Books a portal for backlist authors." Klebanoff said he and his partners raised $2 million to launch the site and are now looking for a "broader group of investors."


Microsoft
Has 'Realistic Expectations'
For Digital Books
Microsoft has "high hopes, but realistic expectations" for the e-book market, Clifford Guren, a business development manager with Microsoft's eBooks division, told the audience attending the annual half-day publishing seminar held by the law firm Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman. "E-books will become a major business, just not today," Guren added.
Despite the splash Microsoft has made in the trade book market with the launch of its Microsoft Reader software, Guren said he expects e-books to first take hold in the college and professional publishing markets. Guren conceded that the demand for e-books will be small until the price of devices comes down and readability improves, but he said Microsoft decided to launch Reader last year because the company felt "we needed to start somewhere. This is going to be an evolutionary process, not a revolution." He agreed that a critical element for the success of e-books is the development of a "ubiquitous standard.... I hope it happens." Guren said Microsoft is working on developing a version of Reader that can be run on Macintosh computers and that the company is considering adapting the software to other platforms as well. The company's most immediate goal, however, is to introduce Reader to Europe, a launch that is set for this spring.
Guren maintained that Microsoft is eager to "help build the e-book industry. We want Microsoft Reader to be a core technology and e-books a commercial success. But we are not out to disintermediate anyone. We don't want to become publishers." He advised any publishers in the audience who haven't become involved with e-books to do so quickly. "This an inexpensive time to make mistakes and to learn about the industry," Guren said.
--Jim Milliot



RB, which is located in New York, is looking for limited electronic rights licenses; they are paying advances ("not huge, but not nominal," he said) and offering "competitive" royalties (25% on titles sold through its site) and aggressive promotion and marketing. Klebanoff expects the distribution and promotion of Rosetta Books to pump up sales of print editions. "We're small, flexible and highly promotable. We can maximize the visibility and sell-through of e-titles and increase the print sell-through, while protecting the value of publishers' books," he said. The site also offers additional editorial value for its e-books, including newly designed jacket art, long excerpts, background information on the book and author, and extensive links to a wide variety of Web-based information on titles and authors. The site will also offer specially packaged electronic collections focused on science fiction, classics, books-into-film, masters of mystery and other genres. Eventually, users will be able click through to bn.com to buy print or audio versions of the books.

"We think we're creating a major indie publishing operation," Klebanoff told PW, "and in two or three years, when the e-reading space explodes, we'll be a leader in that effort."


E-Textbooks from McGraw-Hill, WizeUp
McGraw-Hill has announced an agreement with WizeUp Digital Textbooks, a firm specializing in producing electronic educational materials, to produce about 20 of McGraw-Hill's higher education textbooks in the WizeUp digital format. The e-books, which will be available for the spring semester, will focus on the subjects of business and psychology.

WizeUp offers digital versions of textbooks enhanced with hyperlinks and search, notetaking and highlighting capabilities. Students can access the WizeUp textbooks online via a password-protected Web site and can download the textbooks to their personal computers. Students can also access online updates to the textbooks. WizeUp titles are also designed to be integrated with distance-learning course management applications such as WebCT or Blackboard.

Ed Stanford, president of McGraw-Hill Higher Education, said, "WizeUp products offer robust functionality for students and effective copyright protection for the publisher."

WizeUp also has agreements with such educational publishers as Harcourt College, Pearson Education, Houghton Mifflin, W.W. Norton and John Wiley & Sons. More information on WizeUp Digital Textbooks is at www.wizeup.com.
--Staff


MemoWare, DDH Serve PDA E-Book Market

U.S. Robotics introduced the Palm Pilot in 1996, and since that time the PDA (personal desktop assistant) has become a popular way to record addresses, schedule appointments, write notes and keep to-do lists. More than 10 million of these devices have been sold. Some handheld devices license Palm's operating system, the Palm OS, while other firms use Microsoft's Pocket PC OS, an extension of the Windows CE operating system.

The boom in PDA usage has led to software applications that allow these devices also to be used as digital cameras, wireless e-mail/Internet machines, cell phones and, of course, e-book reading devices. Sites such as MemoWare and DDH Software sprang up to serve the content needs of the growing handheld device community.

When the Palm Pilot was first introduced, Craig Fr hler launched MemoWare (www.memoware.com) as an information site for the then-small Palm Pilot community. Today, MemoWare is one of the largest, most popular PDA Web-based resources, with close to 7,000
free documents, including 4,000 free e-books. On the MemoWare site, most e-book titles are public-domain classics, such as the complete works of Shakespeare, The Inheritors, The Turn of the Screw and Waiting for Godot. And Fr hler told PW that the Web site provides extensive information and links for PDAs and e-book software.


Knovel
Inks Content Deals
Knovel.com, a Web site offering online, interactive editions of reference and scientific texts, has announced new content agreements that will allow the site to offer access to more than 1,000 scientific and research titles.
Knovel.com announced agreements with Reed Elsevier/Butterworth-Heinemann, Woodhead Publishing, Rapra Publishing, Sci-Tech and ChemTec. The subscription site currently offers online access to titles from McGraw-Hill, William Andrew Publishing and Purdue University, along with the proceedings of various professional societies.
Christopher Forbes, president and CEO of Knovel, said the agreements represented Knovel's efforts to provide "the engineering and applied science communities with a broad range of online technical reference works and databases." The site has subscription agreements with more than 125 academic institutions and industrial firms.
--Staff



MemoWare is supported by relevant advertisers, and the content is often uploaded contributions from other PDA users. About 95% of the documents are free. MemoWare supports all PDA formats, not solely the Palm OS. By the end of 2000, the site had more than 5.6 million visitors, for over 20 million pageviews.

Fr hler has also recently launched the PDA Bookstore (pdabookstore.com), a reseller of current e-books. There are about 500 titles on PDA Bookstore from 12 different publishers, including Ebookstand, Atlantic Bridge and Electron Press. The site is just a few weeks old and sales are so far modest, but Fr hler expects that to improve.

Florida-based DDH Software (ddhsoftware.com) developed the award-winning software HanDBase, one of the most robust relational databases for the Palm OS. DDH Software was founded by David Haupert, a Palm user, computer programmer and traveler who developed for his own Palm Pilot a language-translation program that's now available for 18 languages; each program sells for $12.

In addition to HanDBase and the translation programs, DDH Software offers Thesaurus/Spellcheck ($15), which was featured in a pilot educational program using wireless handhelds in secondary schools
(E-publishing, Nov. 6, 2000). The company also sells Children's Illustrated eTales ($4.99 each, or four eTales for $9.98), electronic stories for kids. "As systems become more sophisticated, we would like to have more dynamic experiences involving sound or a pop-up screen," says Paul Hoffman, head of sales and marketing for DDH.

Users can also download from the HanDBase Gallery more than 600 free applets, all contributed by HanDBase users. These small programs can organize personal book libraries, give anatomy references, arrange collections of recipes, supply Spanish medical terms and much more.

Currently, all applications on the site are for Palm OS users, but DDH plans to support other PDA formats.
--Leslie Kang