Brewing eBooks with Borders

This has been one of the most amazing, rewarding and surreal weeks of my life.

Borders has chosen BookBrewer — the first product of my startup, FeedBrewer — to power the engine for its eBook self-publishing service.  You can read about our partnership in the official press release, or in media coverage from a variety of sources including Fast Company, Publishers Weekly and PC Magazine.

We made the announcement at BlogWorld Expo, one of the largest confabs of bloggers and new media enthusiasts in the world. The response at our booth was enormous and even overwhelming at times, with people lined up to talk to me, my team and Borders’ eBook manager Kelly Peterson about how they can turn their content into sellable eBooks. Their response is not surprising, given the explosive growth in eBook sales in recent months.

Some highlights on the partnership:

• On October 25 the same technology and user experience will be  surfaced on a separate site called Borders Get Published, Powered by BookBrewer. You can enter your e-mail address on the form on Borders.bookbrewer.com to be notified as soon as the service launches.
• Books published through both BookBrewer and Borders Get Published will be available for purchase on Borders.com and viewable in Borders-branded apps (such as Kobo), but will also appear in other eBook stores that BookBrewer has relationships with. Those include Amazon.com and KoboBooks.com, with more on the way.
• Borders will use its marketing muscle to encourage thousands of new authors to get published, and will promote promising new authors in its weekly emails and on its Web site. This is a huge boon for self-published authors because Borders reaches more than 30 million people per week in e-mails alone.

From left to right: Todd Levy, Laurelie Ezra, Kelly Peterson, Dan Pacheco.

BookBrewer, which only launched last week, will operate as its own entity. We will serve customers through both sites, and will roll out more strategic “Powered By BookBrewer” services throughout the year that benefit our company and partners, in addition to other services for authors and content providers.

Some people are surprised that Borders would want “their” eBooks to show up in competitors’ stores, but it makes sense when you think about the self-publishing customer. They want their content to be everywhere that people want to buy it.

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