Brewing eBooks with Borders
I can tell you from spending two days in a booth with Kelly Peterson and talking extensively with others at Borders that they’re one of the most customer-focused companies around. They understand that authors — a category that now potentially includes each and every one of you — don’t want their content to be defined or confined based on which service or programs they use to create it. The customer always comes first for them, and with self-publishing the book always belongs to the author.
Kelly put it best over dinner: “If you buy a piece of clothing at a store, you expect to be able to wear it everywhere, not just in the store where you bought it.” You can see that evidenced with the wide variety of eBook readers and apps Borders promotes, beyond the Kobo reader the company invested in last year.
I’m also excited to work with Borders because they, and bookstores in general, are part of the fabric of local communities — that rapidly disappearing third place that has been so important in the history of civil life. Other types of third spaces exist online, but at a local level physical meeting spaces are still important. Digital community engagement is the common thread in my most meaningful endeavors (Bakotopia, Printcasting and AOL Hometown as just a few examples), and as a previous recipient of a Knight News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation I’m a proud public champion of helping the news and information needs of communities in the digital age. I see BookBrewer and Borders Get Published being strongly connected to those goals.
On that note, I want to once again thank the Knight Foundation for its role in the Printcasting project, which evolved into my company FeedBrewer, Inc., from which the Knight Foundation will one day benefit thanks to a voluntary 6% gift to the Knight Media Innovation Fund. While the Knight Foundation didn’t provide any funding for our proudly “bootstrapped” BookBrewer (and we did not ask for any), BookBrewer is an example of how non-profit seed funds can light a spark that continues to burn later. It’s my sincere hope that future successes from BookBrewer will go to help fund other startups that help local news and information.
The technology for BookBrewer is all new and distinct from Printcasting, but the thinking, methodology and customer insights evolved from it. In fact, thinking back, the biggest thing we learned from Printcasting was that even first-time print publishers really wanted to be multi-platform digital publishers, but didn’t know that until they got their feet wet. In the space of a few weeks after publishing a PDF magazine, they would start asking us if they could publish the same stories into Facebook or as a blog, and they would tell us that they saw print as only a small part of their future business. They also started asking about eBooks as the Kindle and, later, iPad grew in popularity.
The feedback we’re getting with eBooks validates that. People occasionally ask us if we can provide print-on-demand paperbacks for their books, but when we say we’re currently focused on digital books they’re fine with that. Most just want to make sure older readers who don’t have eReading devices, iPhones or iPads to have a print option (and we will be looking into that, by the way).
What I’ve learned through this process is that when you have an idea that you’re passionate about, people will step in at the last minute to help you out. I think the BookBrewer product engenders a desire to reciprocate after authors see how much it can do for them. We even had the leader of a writer’s group in Florida buy an ad in a conference program for BookBrewer with her own funds — a first in my 15 years of working on digital products.
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