Foreign Policy tries a new ebook experiment, selling outside Amazon

That’s the title of an article by Andrew Phelps in the Nieman Journalism Lab blog.  More info in the article:

It took 18 days for Egyptian protesters to topple Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year regime; it took about 10 days for the editors at Foreign Policy to publish a 70,000-word ebook about the revolution.

“Revolution in the Arab World” is FP’s second attempt at a new publishing model — call it the medium form — to quickly repackage its own reporting and charge for it (in this case, $4.99). The stories inside are already on the web, free, but the magazine hopes readers are willing to pay for the context of a compilation and the convenience of a single download.

It’s about “putting this smart journalism in front of people outside the very, very fast web cycle — but while it still matters to readers,” said Susan Glasser, Foreign Policy’s editor in chief. The medium form, more comprehensive than a story but less so than a traditional book, is a fast and inexpensive way to satiate readers who demand information right now.

One thousand copies of “Revolution” sold in the first 10 days, Glasser said.

Foreign Policy is one of a number of news organizations experimenting with journalism-as-ebook. The New York Times recently published an ebook of reporting on the WikiLeaks story for $5.99, and we’ve written about ProPublica publishing Sebastian Rotella’s 13,000-word piece on the Mumbai terror attacks as a 99-cent Kindle Single, Amazon’s new format for inexpensive, 30- to 90-page stories. That ebook sold 3,500 copies in about a month.

For “Revolution,” the FP editors reviewed a year of their own reporting and selected about four dozen stories they deemed to have lasting insight and value. They decided on a structure of six chapters, opening with a January 2010 piece from Issandr El Amrani that presciently describes Egypt as a “ticking time bomb.” The pieces were updated, lightly edited for clarity and dressed up with introductions from the editors.

Glasser views this midform journalism as a low-impact experiment; the pricing was chosen because Glasser said, as an iPad owners, it just felt right. “Listen, we’re testing it out. We don’t know. We’re a small organization trying to figure out the business,” she said. Foreign Policy employs 30 people.