Everybody’s getting in on the e-book act these days. On Digital Book World’s website, Jeremy Greenfield reports that NBC News is launching an e-publishing arm, NBC Publishing. NBC took notice of consumers’ increasing comfort level with electronic books, including those that feature video, and has decided to leverage its existing archives of over one million hours of video content to create such e-books (and some traditional print-only ones as well).
NBC has hired a number of publishing-industry veterans to staff the new publishing arm, as well as adding a couple of its own television production staff. The company will continue to work on book partnerships with existing publishing partners while also developing new content in-house. It will use its other media properties, including broadcast and cable television networks and msnbc.com, to cross-promote the new e-books.
This is not the first example of an entity realizing it can convert existing material into new revenue streams (the New York Times has already been doing this with Kindle Singles, as have some individual authors), and it certainly will not be the last. I wonder who else is going to start e-publishing soon?
