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Friday, January 29, 2010

Tech / Books Hacking Books to Pieces for Money

Posted by Paul Constant on Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 3:30 PM

TeleRead informs us that yet another online ebookstore has opened. I know, I know. But wait! There's a catch:

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.

The company is called eBookPie.com. The gimmick is that you can buy individual chapters. You can visit the website here.I think this is a good idea for certain kinds of books. If a lot of different ebooksellers like Apple's iBookstore picks up this model, it could be a great idea for the future of short stories, for instance. Frankly, I love the idea of being able to buy individual short stories from a book, like buying tracks from an album. Or recipes from cookbooks, or regions from travel books. It could be a whole new revenue model for authors, if publishers are willing to think differently about ebooks than just...well, electronic books.

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This is potentially a great idea. It would lend itself well to serialized novels, the kind that were popular in the 19th century magazine publishing. An author could publish a new chapter every couple of weeks and charge a small fee.

It worked for Dickens, why wouldn't it work today?

Posted by Smartypants on January 29, 2010 at 4:59 PM