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Technology Stocks : Fatbrain.com Inc. (FATB) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hamid MArandi who wrote (209)	8/31/1999 3:28:00 PM
From: Cleve Noyes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 332

Finally!!! The train has left the station... FatBrain launches EMatter initiative Project will allow secure Web-based publishing and sales By Bambi Francisco, CBS MarketWatch Last Update: 1:07 PM ET Aug 31, 1999 Internet Daily Net headlines SANTA CLARA (CBS.MW) -- Shares of online bookseller Fatbrain soared over 29 percent Tuesday after the company introduced a new program designed to allow individuals and publishers to digitally publish documents securely and sell them on the Web. Shares rose 4 3/16 to 19 3/16 on heavy volume. The new initiative, called EMatter, could very well open the doors to would-be authors, with ideas of writing a 10- to 100-page book, document, or report, to publish their content through FatBrain, at a reasonable cost and eventually earn royalties on every copy sold. Santa Clara, Calif.-based FatBrain (FATB: news, msgs) derives the bulk of its sales by selling technical-related books online. FatBrain will charge authors $1 a month to keep documents on its site. As a promotion to get content, until mid-October, FatBrain will waive that fee until mid-April and give the author 100 percent of the royalties until January 1. Chris MacAskill, FatBrain's Chief Executive believes the new product will spawn a new opportunity for the company as well as for self-publishers. He even has his own 17-page document on the origin of FatBrain's name, digitally online and for sale at $7. "This is the a new story for us" and an extension of the company's current business, he said. The EMatter service will also secure documents with the use of Adobe Secure PDF and Microsoft secure Word formats. This allows authors to control the digital rights of their works, the company said. Initially, MacAskill expects authors or writers that have a fairly short document with no home, to use EMatter. Already, he noted that one author of computer books has already filed a 40-page document with FatBrain. This author has a publisher for his other larger books, but for less than 100 pages, EMatter made sense, MacAskill said. MacAskill hopes that by mid-October, the company will have 10,000 documents. Of course, due to the company's promotional incentive campaign, revenues will be zilch until January and marginal for some time. The cost of engineering and marketing will also be expenses to swallow as the company ramps up business. If the company's print-on-demand initiative is any guide, EMatter could account for a sizable portion in a year. MacAskill noted that print-on-demand sales accounted for 11 percent of total sales, up from 1 percent a year ago. While it's unclear just how much EMatter sales will account for. "It better be significant," he said. Indeed, the Street analysts share the same optimism. Tom Courtney, an analyst at Banc of America Securities raised his rating to a "strong buy" from a "buy," citing "significant leverage" in the EMatter service business model. The upside could be "material," he said. Keith Benjamin, an Internet analyst at BancBoston Robertson Stephens, reiterated his "buy" rating. The business model for EMatter is similar to that of an online auction whereby the publisher or author sets the price per download per document while paying a monthly fee to list the item. Benjamin expects that once ramped up, EMatter could generate about $320 in sales per title. Small publishers find the service attractive as well because they can get shorter documents to the market faster. FatBrain doesn't believe it displaces publishers since the company doesn't offer the value-add or expertise that publishers do. Down the road, FatBrain plans to have resources that will allow individuals edit their pieces. To prevent a massive flow of material that's "not fit for print," FatBrain reserves the right to remove objectionable content. But barring anything too egregious, you can expect a document to printed in less than 24 hours, the company said. Eventually, MacAskill sees magazines, printing back issue articles. He plans on paying a visit to The New Yorker magazine to see if they'd like to digitally publish an old article about Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker, which he believes would sell for a few bucks.