iPublish Closes
© Richard Loeffler
Times Warner is calling iPublish "A Good Idea In a Bad Time" after announcing last week that they will be closing down the e-publishing experiment - at least temporarily. The whole idea behind iPublish and its two other parts, iRead and iLearn was to discover new authors and find out what the reading public is interested in. Times Warner thought that the web was the most efficient way of doing this and they were probably right. But where they went wrong was trying to short-change the authors they were attempting to discover. The Writer's Union of America had a list of complaints regarding rights and payment that didn't help iPublish attract writers but Times Warner obviously didn't have much faith in the authors it did manage to attract.
First, if you were among the lucky three authors to be picked each quarter (nine all together,) Times Warner would publish your book in an electronic format. As a promoter of electronic publishing, I should be happy about this but if I was an aspiring author having my book published in electronic format by a mainly p-book publisher would not thrill me. Times Warner did little to promote their e-books.
If your e-book sold well, Times Warner would then make it available as a POD. And if demand was high enough you might then actually get published in a paper format. It seems like an awful lot of hoops to jump through to get a book out. No wonder iPublishing is closing. Any serious author would rather collect rejection slips than go through all these "market tests" before getting his book into the bookstore.
Times Warner will continue to produce electronic editions of p-books and will publish the existing nine books as part of the Warner mass-market division.
iPublish sustained losses of approximately $13 million, and 29 employees are being let go as a result. iPublish head Greg Voynow also says the problem did not lie with the content coming in through iPublish, but with the ability to convert those books into sales. Larry Kirshbaum says, "The acquisition costs were turning out to be too high. We can buy books from agents for $10,000 or $20,000 and it was effectively costing us $50,000 to acquire it this way. The scale wasn't there."
First, if you were among the lucky three authors to be picked each quarter (nine all together,) Times Warner would publish your book in an electronic format. As a promoter of electronic publishing, I should be happy about this but if I was an aspiring author having my book published in electronic format by a mainly p-book publisher would not thrill me. Times Warner did little to promote their e-books.
If your e-book sold well, Times Warner would then make it available as a POD. And if demand was high enough you might then actually get published in a paper format. It seems like an awful lot of hoops to jump through to get a book out. No wonder iPublishing is closing. Any serious author would rather collect rejection slips than go through all these "market tests" before getting his book into the bookstore.
Times Warner will continue to produce electronic editions of p-books and will publish the existing nine books as part of the Warner mass-market division.
iPublish sustained losses of approximately $13 million, and 29 employees are being let go as a result. iPublish head Greg Voynow also says the problem did not lie with the content coming in through iPublish, but with the ability to convert those books into sales. Larry Kirshbaum says, "The acquisition costs were turning out to be too high. We can buy books from agents for $10,000 or $20,000 and it was effectively costing us $50,000 to acquire it this way. The scale wasn't there."
Times Warner press release follows.
NEW YORK, NY, DECEMBER 4, 2001 (11:00 A.M. EST) Laurence Kirshbaum, chairman of Time Warner Trade Publishing, announced "with great regret" today that its electronic publishing division
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