Tuesday August 31, 12:01 am Eastern Time
FatBrain to introduce online model to sell text
By Andrea Orr
PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug 31 (Reuters) - When you say ``online bookstore,'
Fatbrain.com (Nasdaq:FATB - news) is not the name that most people think of.
But Fatbrain will introduce on 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
(Nasdaq:AMZN - news) 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The company says the service will provide a new way to exchange unpublished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.' |
