S. Kritikos on Fri, 3 Sep 1999 23:51:44 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Fatbrain To Introduce Online Model To Sell Text |
Hi Comments welcome on the following, an effort to set up a commercially viable system to sell short texts. On the one hand we are all accustomed to getting free papers online, on the other the realities of academic life and funding being what they are any possibility for independence from institutions is in my view welcome. sk Tuesday August 31 12:54 AM ET Fatbrain To Introduce Online Model To Sell Text By Andrea Orr PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - When you say ``online bookstore,'' Fatbrain.com is not the name that most people think of. But Fatbrain will introduce Tuesday a new technology for selling books, magazine articles and other documents over the Internet that it says will do more to change the publishing world than any service offered by Amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com. It says its new service could do for publishing what the MP3 technology has done for the music industry. Fatbrain, which to date has focused selling business and professional books, has developed a new system, called eMatter, that allows book and magazine publishers as well as individuals to sell digitized documents online, and earn royalties on every copy sold. The company says the service will provide a new way to exchange unpublished material, including documents like company research papers that have never been economical to print. It says authors may use the service to sell their work directly to the reader, while magazine publishers may use it to resell articles that have been printed in past editions. ``This is going to be one of those things like MP3 and eBay where you can't predict what will happen,'' said Fatbrain Chief Executive Chris MacAskill. ``There has never been an economic channel for the 10-to-100 page document. Authors have had to write for newspapers or magazines, or write a book. What if you want to write something that's 20 pages and sell it? There's never been a model for this.'' eMatter incorporates more secure technologies than most existing systems for selling documents online, Fatbrain says. The author can set his own price, provide a summary of the material and then place the work into one of thousands of subject categories on the Fatbrain Web site. They will receive 50-percent royalties for each sale of the work posted. To initially promote the new service, Fatbrain will offer 100 percent royalties on material sold on eMatter between October 18 and January 1. MacAskill said the material sold might include notes from conference proceedings, newsletters, corporate white letters, training manuals or analyst reports on stocks. ``I think it will change the world of publishing,'' he said. ''It will empower a whole range of authors to go straight to the people.'' # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net