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By Court Merrigan

OR Books, a new publisher aimed at progressive readers, will use e-books and POD to bypass bookstores. Publishing industry veterans John Oakes and Colin Robinson plan to "skate into the future" of publishing.

Evidently they intend to cut the big chain bookstores out of the loop.  In a promotional video, they are shown standing gleefully in front of a closed Barnes & Noble megastore in New York. No mention of goliath Amazon, however. And no word on how they’ll be doing this, exactly, or when. They do claim to be "platform agnostic", so let’s hope this means their e-books will be DRM-free, if not by default, then at least by choice of the authors. Perhaps they’ll be using an Espresso Book Machine.

OR Books don’t yet appear to have a full-fledged Web site, just a placeholder with e-mail addressses (colin.robinson@orbooks.com and john.oakes@orbooks.com).  On the All Rights Reserved Publisher’s Marketplace Photostream there is a picture of Oakes and Robinson launching OR Books,megaphone in hand.

In the past they’ve worked with authors ranging from Cory Doctorow to Noam Chomsky, and it will be interesting to see how many of these progressive writers try the new house.

(Spotted at HarperStudio. Video of OR Books founder is from OR Books on Vimeo.)

 
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