selling digital content online and trying to leverage its Web site and some new technology, says TechWeb News.
They call the program eMatter and will sell digital versions of popular tech works, while letting any other authors put up content for sale on site while keeping the bulk of the selling price in their own coffers.
EMatter went live Wednesday. Full e-commerce capabilities should begin in mid-October, TechWeb says.
The only problems are: Countless Web sites and publishers have tried selling content online and most have failed spectacularly, while numerous Net surfers are skittish about buying content online which they think they can download free elsewhere. Fatbrain, though, believes they can strike a highly technical customer base which "often has pressing needs for highly targeted content," says TechWeb.
And, the company believes book publishers are less threatened than intrigued by the ways digital downloading could enhance their print operations - even saving them the cost of overprinting when books don't sell as anticipated.
To publish through eMatter, an author would upload his document to Fatbrain.com as an Adobe PDF file, Microsoft Word document, Postcript file, or text file. Then, he or she would set a price, offer any summary information, and put the work into one of thousands of subject categories Fatbrain makes available.
The authors would get 50 percent or better royalties, as opposed to a far smaller percentage through traditional publishing. A $40 tech book sold through the usual way could land the author about $200,000 if the book sells 100,000 copies. Published through eMatter, the same author with a 100 page white paper selling at $15 a copy could pull in the same $200,000 selling only 25,000 copies.
TechWeb says eMatter will use a new, secure download technology for Adobe Acrobat called PDF Merchant and Acrobat Reader with WebBuy. The online news service also says Fatbrain and Microsoft are working on a secure download technology for Word files.
Publishers who have signed up to sell eMatter documents online now include Macmillan USA, McGraw-Hill, O'Reilly and Associates, Salon.com, the Coriolis Group, and Motley Fool.
