Trade publishing's most elaborate experiment in e-publishing came to an end last week when Time Warner Trade Publishing announced it is folding iPublish and at least temporarily abandoning its idea of using the Web as a place to troll for unknown writers. Twenty-nine people have been let go as a result of the closure.
The company will continue reprinting e-book editions of paper books, and possibly even original work by print authors, via BookMark, the house's online marketing division. A transition team will stay on for one to two months to work on that integration. Of the nine iPublish authors whose books were scheduled for print publication, the company expects most to still be published, possibly as part of the Warner mass market division. The iPublish Web site will be closed.
iPublish weighed various means of survival, but decided to close after realizing that it wouldn't reach its original goal of breaking even in 2002. TWTP CEO Larry Kirshbaum said that, in tough economic times, he couldn't afford "jeopardizing" the print business with the added weight of a losing digital program. iPublish has lost approximately $13 million.
"You've got to go up there and take some swings, and I'll take the strikeout on this one," Kirshbaum said, acknowledging, "We probably scaled up too quickly in the expectation that the consumer side would be stronger."
iPublish started in May 2000 with the ambitious mandate of building a publishing house around a writing community, although some wondered recently how long TWTP would support the operation. "The acquisition costs were turning out to be too high," Kirshbaum told PW. "We can buy books from agents for $10,000 or $20,000, and it was effectively costing us $50,000 to acquire it this way. The scale wasn't there."
To some in the industry, the closing of iPublish confirmed a feeling that a conglomerate house would have trouble succeeding in a business normally inhabited by smaller presses. The iPublish announcement came about a month after Random House folded its dedicated e-book arm, AtRandom, into its other units.
iPublish head Greg Voynow said the problem did not lie with the content coming into iPublish, but with the ability to convert those books into sales. "The lesson is that real publishers can find real writers. It isn't just vanity space or Joe Blow paying money to get junk published," he said. "But there wasn't a revenue side, at least not a critical mass."
Kirshbaum did leave open the possibility of restarting a writer's community. "We've deferred the dream. We haven't killed it."
