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Innovative new ebook store launches – eBookPie, get a book or just a chapter
January 29, 2010 | 7:15 am
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By Paul Biba
I met these folks at Book Expo America last year and they told me of this great idea they had for a new ebook store. Why not sell not only whole ebooks, but also provide just the chapters people need. It’s a perfect idea for travel books, for example. They have gotten everything up and running and here is part of their email to me:
We just sent out a joint-press release with Wiley & Wrox
Press, who are helping us kick-start the eChapter program. The store
currently has over 235K eBook titles plus about 2500 eChapters.The eChapter catalog, which is a big focus for us, has hundreds of free
chapters in PDF from the various Wiley imprints (Dummies, Frommer’s etc.)
and over 2000 PDF chapters from Wrox. In future we’ll be adding a lot more
from a variety of publishers as they get comfortable with the idea (we
actually have our own proprietary tool, called the “Chapterizer” that can
automatically split PDF books into stand-alone packaged chapters with cover,
back pages etc. We’ll be making that service available publically in the
near future). And we also offer the entire O’Reilly Media ePub catalog.
More details in their press release and you can visit their site here. They are currently offering 65% off on new releases and NYT bestsellers to celebrate their opening.
Another new idea in publishing that comes from ebook people - not the publishers, themselves.
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Comments:
Innovative? This was what Shortcovers was doing. And then it didn’t work. And chunking is standard practice. This isn’t very innovative…
A quick look at the site also reveals that they do not distinguish whether or not the DRM’d Adobe they are offering is PDF or ePub.
The difference between a PDF file and an ePub book seems like a basic thing for an e-book store to make note of in their catalog.
Jean, thank you for that feedback. Up until about a month ago we actually did show a choice between “Adobe PDF (DRM)” and “Adobe ePub (DRM)”. But based on some feedback we received during beta we made a decision to consolidate those into simply “Adobe DRM” so to reduce confusion for those who were new to ebooks (which made up the majority of our testers). Our thinking was that, for the average customer, there was not enough difference between the two to justify having two choices (and given the number of new and confusing choices they were already dealing with, any reduction seemed a good thing). However, we have since received responses similar to yours, and have also encountered some reading devices that, at least in our experience, are more friendly to Adobe ePub-DRM than to Adobe PDF-DRM (Sony PRS-300 for one).
So in the short term we’ve decided to revert to offering a choice between Adobe PDF (DRM) and Adobe ePub (DRM). Maybe someday we’ll be able to offer all titles in only open ePub (as we do with the O’Reilly Media titles) and thus not require what can be for some a confusing format choice. That would make it far easier for all concerned, but I’m not holding my breath.