From Publishing Perspectives. Here’s a snippet:
BARCELONA: In a recent memo to publishers on GigaOM, award-winning journalist Matthew Ingram asked a painful question: Remind Us Why You Exist Again?
Catalan publisher Ernest Folch has been preparing an answer, although it is partial and in ongoing review…
Folch has served as Editorial Director of Ediciones B — a privately held, medium-size trade publisher of best-selling popular fiction and non-fiction — since February 2011. He launched their digital imprint, B de Books, last November, making them the first commercial and profit-driven publisher to offer DRM-free e-books. Prices started at 0.99 euros, a bold step in a market where the tight-lipped agreement is that e-books can’t be priced below 70% of the full price of their paper counterparts.
“To carry out B de Books, we didn’t need a huge investment, but above all a consistent project and a way to explain it. The story we were going to tell, both inside and outside the company, had to be a great story,” says Folch in an interview.
Maybe the most important decision made by Ediciones B was that their digital imprint had to be fully autonomous from the bread-and-butter core business: paper books. “The dynamics of marketing, pricing, distribution and merchandising are different, and had to be so independent that we could allow ourselves to go on, even if they collided with our traditional business,” he says, admitting that this first step was excruciatingly difficult, “We needed to reinvent ourselves. It was almost an ontological chore.”
