Commercial ebook publishing and distribution is a crowded space: Amazon, Apple, Google, Barnes and Noble and others each have stores and devices for digital books, which have been seeing consistent growth. Ebooks are undoubtedly the future of long-from content. They’ve opened up a whole range of new publishing opportunities for independent authors, and the significance of being able to self-publish books so cheaply and simply should not be underestimated.

For the most part, the focus on ebooks has been commercial. One area that’s underrepresented: free contemporary ebooks. While many exist, and most commercial ebook stores like Amazon and Google Books have some free ebooks, there’s no central source for readers to download free ebooks or for authors to distribute them under more lenient licenses like Creative Commons.

With Leebre, Michael Bethencourt — a 22-year-old free software and free culture fan who graduated with a Computer Science degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison — plans to change that (Bethencourt’s previously contributed to open source projects like Google’s MOE and the games Nexuiz and Warzone 2100, and during college he did internships with Microsoft, Facebook and supercomputer company Cray). “Right now, there aren’t really any good communities for independent authors to publish their works, and certainly none focused around free culture,” he says. “Furthermore, independent authors have no easy-to-use tools for making ebooks or nicely formatted online books, so self-distribution and self-publishing is really hard, unless they have technical knowledge.”

“Leebre intends to fill this gap: provide a community and tools for independent authors to publish their work and get noticed,” says Bethencourt. “In 2010, I received a Nook as a gift, and was rather dismayed to find that there was no huge repository of fresh, free fiction, just like I was used to for music,” he says, referencing Jamendo. The repository for free music from independent artists was a huge inspiration to him, and he wants Leebre to provide similar resources and community to independent authors.

A community of readers and writers

Bethencourt has an ambitious vision for a community platform that will both give authors an easy way to format and share their work, and readers a place to find free books and connect with their favorite authors. A cornerstone of Leebre, like Jamendo, will be the driving free culture philosophy and use of Creative Commons for licensing. However, Bethencourt’s vision goes far beyond website simply for Creative Commons books to be hosted and shared. The community, especially, is what he hopes will differentiate Leebre from popular ebook stores like Google Books and Amazon. “The key to (for example) YouTube’s success wasn’t that it was simply a host for videos, but that it was a social platform built around videos,” he says. “Readers like being able to connect with authors, and vice-versa.”

Readers can support authors through donations and links to other sites that sell books, like Amazon and Lulu. Bethencourt doesn’t see services like these as competition; instead, Leebre is “intended to complement them.”

One of the more interesting ideas he has for the donate button: authors can choose to support a cause and have donations directed to a non-profit of their choice. “I hope to see even established authors distribute short stories or books on it in order to fundraise for a cause,” he says.

Each book will be downloadable in ePub, MOBI, HMTL, and PDF, and can be read online as well.

Leebre for authors

Of course, the most important part about a website for book lovers is the selection of books. But Bethencourt isn’t worried about that part. The feedback he’s seen from authors has been positive and supportive. He expects it to be a platform where works that might not otherwise be published will be given a chance. Short stories, for example — “anyone who has completed a Creative Writing degree (and I know this since I took several creative writing classes while in college, which have definitely influenced my design decisions) will have probably 5 or 6 or so rather decent short stories which are basically un-publishable through conventional means.” Novels are much more of an investment from authors, but he expects a strong community, the donation system, and the opportunity to get noticed will “be enough to offset trepidations about posting it for free.”

“With my discussions with authors, it would seem the biggest barrier isn’t ‘not wanting to give them for free’, but rather just the effort of putting them online, and in a place people would download them,” says Bethencourt, “The authors I’ve shown the website to barely bat an eye at the idea of posting their work for free: they’re generally just enthralled to put it up somewhere, and not have it rot on their hard-drive looking like crap.”

A major draw for authors — and an integral part of the platform and Bethencourt’s vision for its future — is an online book editor. It’s how books are uploaded, and it’s how every author will be able to have a professional looking ebook without having to worry about formatting and design.

The process of adding a book to Leebre

Everything on Leebre will first go through the online editor (built entirely using HTML and JavaScript), to ensure a high quality, consistent display of all books, regardless of the format. Authors can either upload their books (as a .doc, .docx, .odt, .html, or .epub) or simply copy and paste the text in, which actually works better, according to Bethencourt (and it means you can upload a book from any source that supports “copy”). Then the system parses the text and “guesses” at what’s what — dedication, chapter headers, prologue, endnotes, footnotes, etc. The author then gets a chance to check whether the system guessed right, but he says it usually does, “especially if you are uploading as an ePub which gives a few more clues than, say, Word.” The book can be worked on within the editor, and Bethencourt has plans for group editing and “crowd-sourced” editing.

Semantic book editing

This is all done with the help of an internal format that Bethencourt’s currently calling “SemBook” for Semantic Book, because it “encodes the book in a very semantic way. That is, it retains much more of the author’s intent than ePub or MOBI.” Instead of using normal formatting tools — bold, font size, etc. — to set how each chapter header, footnote and everything else looks, everything is specified as what it is (chapter, footnote…). Then, depending on the style chosen, everything will be formatted automatically. “It is inspired by LaTeX, and so has a What You Mean is What You Get philosophy, as opposed to word processors and their What You See is What You Get,” says Bethencourt.

The use of the semantic format allows for some pretty cool things to be done. For one, it makes it really easy for a book to look good, without the author knowing anything about design. The author just makes sure everything is specified in the editor, and then chooses a styling template (there will be many to choose from). The template takes care of making everything look how it’s supposed to, and the look of the entire book can be changed simply by changing the template. “That way, it always achieves excellent formatting, no matter what the author originally submitted: the manuscript could be in 20pt pink Comic Sans, but the result will be the same across authors,” explains Bethencourt, “With Leebre, I want to even the playing field and give independent authors this same ‘professional’ look.”

In the future, this could become an even bigger part of the platform: “Eventually, I hope to connect graphic artists and people with experience in typesetting to authors, by providing standardized ways to specify templates to the graphic artists, and a similar community (with rating systems, comments, popularity metrics, and so on), to create and consume templates for books. This is to provide the largest possible selection to authors for style.”

The internal format also makes it easy for books to be published on Leebre in various formats. “As long as the author can get it into this [SemBook] format, it can be formatted extremely well as any other format.” For example, in the ePub and Kindle formats, anything specified as a chapter in Leebre’s editor will be designated as a chapter in the table of contents.

The format even recognizes more complicated elements like dialog, which allows quotation marks to be customized depending on language.

The semantic format pervades Leebre’s concept. But to almost everyone, it’ll be invisible (the only people who need to deal with it are developers and eventually designers). Authors upload a document or copy and paste their books to get them into Leebre; readers read them online or download them in ePub, MOBI, HTML, or PDF. Behind the scenes, SemBook makes it all work. “The semantic format is something only used internally, and is the ‘secret sauce,’ if you will, to getting automatic professional looking formatting, without using a typesetting program.”

Eventually, Bethencourt would like to spin the editor off and make it easy for other projects, like Project Gutenberg, to make use of it. “Project Gutenberg right now has a massive collection of public domain books,” he says, “but they are all inconsistently and sloppily formatted.”

Bethencourt sees the ease of publishing books with the online editor as something that sets Leebre apart from other ebook stores. “I’ve looked at Amazon some, and it’s not a simple task to turn your manuscript into a publishable ebook,” he says, “With Leebre, it is a very simple task, and the end product is polished, elegant, and to publishing standards. The online edition looks like a real paperback book.”

Where it stands

Bethencourt has been working on Leebre for just over a year. The core is nearly ready, although Bethencourt says “there are a few non-essential features that are unfinished (such as the rating system), and a few others which do not live up to my vision.” He plans to launch a private beta in mid-February, open to Kickstarter supporters and anyone who’s submitted a beta request. He wants it to be “stunning” before it’s available to everyone.

On Kickstarter, the project has passed its goal of $3000, for a virtual private server for the beta.

After the private beta, Bethencourt plans to open it up to those with .edu email addresses, and finally to the public. He hopes to involve more developers — currently, it’s only him, Rebecca Carvalho as publicist, and another developer that hasn’t started — and “get the software itself polished up and separate, so that projects like archive.org, Project Gutenberg, WikiBooks, and WikiSource can all benefit from better formatting.”

As far as financials, he plans to create a a 501(c) non-profit, making donations “easier and tax-deductible,” but is waiting until the project is more established. “I’m planning on going the route of other free software non-profits, like Mozilla, the Document Foundation, etc.,” he says. The project will be funded by donations, an occasional fundraising drive if necessary, and perhaps branded gear for sale, although it’s obvious that money is of little importance to Leebre, beyond what’s needed to sustain it. The project promises “100% dedication to the community and free software,” and that there “will never be ads, or any other sort of compromise of the site’s mission.”

“I plan on keeping it dedicated to the free software and free culture community,” Bethencourt says, “I want it to be the best tool for educators, writers, and readers, and so I intend to keep it non-profit.”

Along with the crowd-sourced editing feature, Bethencourt plans for online creativity workshops that mimic traditional creative writing courses and workshops, internalization (of the site, and of books, potentially through crowd-translating), and eventually, support for more diverse types of fiction like graphic novels and illustrations.

(Fre)ebook revolution

Jamendo, Flickr, Wikipedia and many other projects have proven that both the creators and consumers exist to make free projects work. The demand is there, and Leebre seems a welcome companion for both readers and authors. Bethencourt has a long road ahead of him to make Leebre succeed, with his ambitious vision as both its greatest asset and greatest challenge. Above all though, the project’s success will hinge on its community. It needs people willing and able to fill it with quality independent books. And it needs readers passionate enough to make it worth it. It’s an uphill battle, for sure — but for the sake of independent authors, readers, and the free culture movement, I hope Bethencourt succeeds.

➤ Leebre.org
➤ Leebre on Kickstarter

Livefyre, which you may notice provides the commenting system we use here at The Next Web (this is our full disclosure), announced this week that is has launched version 2.0 of its product, as well as a round of new funding led by Greycroft Partners.

The company tells us that the service has grown to an install base of over 14,000 sites since its original launch, and has been popular with individuals as well as global publishers like ours.

Sites installing Livefyre are seeing some measurable results on average, the company says, including:

• 25% increase in page views
• 52% increase in comments per page
• 20% increase in time on site

Other sites using Lifefyre include BlogHer, and The Sun.

Real-time commenting does indeed keep people on a site longer, because it isn’t static and boring. With version 2.0, Livefyre has added more social features such as profile pictures of users “listening”, meaning people on the page at that moment, as well as up to the second updates on new comments.

We asked Livefyre’s CEO Jordan Kretchmer a few questions about the company’s growth and why its different from most commenting systems.

TNW: What is LiveFyre’s biggest differentiator?

Jordan Kretchmer: Our focus on real-time participation creates a completely new kind of social experience for commenters and bloggers right on site content. That’s really the key here – we differentiate on sparking and fostering participation on YOUR site, instead of pushing it off to a social network. But to go one step further – we bring relevant conversations from around the Web back to your site, too. We help turn blogger and publisher content into the conversation hub.

TNW: What have you done that others have failed to pick up, what’s your leg up on competitors?

Jordan Kretchmer: From the very beginning, we put a premium on user experience, making commenting an active and surprisingly fun experience. Our social features, like SocialSync™ and FriendTagging are industry firsts, and we have plenty more exciting features like that up our sleeves. We are constantly innovating on how people can interact with site content and with each other.

TNW: Do you find that social media platform comments are pushing Blog commenting away from the norm? ie: Tweets and Facebook comments

Jordan Kretchmer: I think that external social media platforms have changed people’s’ expectations of how they want to interact with one another. Our goal with Livefyre is raise those expectations even higher by expanding on what those external networks have done, all right on the publisher’s site. For example, the ability to tag friends from all of your social networks, and from other people in that site’s community, is unique and powerful. Livefyre in essence connects me, to my friends from everywhere, to the content I like to talk about.

TNW: What is the first thing you’re doing with funding? What is the funding for?

Jordan Kretchmer: First thing we’re doing with the funding is rounding out our product engineering team, and growing our sales and business development practices. The net result of that is that you’ll start to see us adding new features faster than ever, and you’ll start seeing more of the little “Powered by Livefyre” logo all over the web. And soon.

It sounds like Livefyre is ready to battle a war with competitors such as Echo, Disqus, and even Facebook who has its own embeddable commenting system for blogs and publications.

Joseph Robert Lewis is a writer. He’s not your local Starbucks writer in hipster clothes, staring lovingly at his Macbook Pro and failing to break 100 words a day. He’s a professional.

His experience includes years of writing and editing in the book publishing industry and in online publishing. He’s capable of hammering out book after book without blinking. Right now, you can purchase five of Lewis’ fictions and his tome on presentations digitally. But it wasn’t always like that.

Under the rule of the traditional publishing companies, now slowly losing their grip on long-form content, Lewis hadn’t had any success cracking the market.

“I tried the traditional route for several years: write a book, pitch it to 50 agents and editors, get 5 actual rejections and a lot of silence, and repeat. It became a pretty depressing treadmill, despite some positive feedback and requests to read my books,” Lewis told me in an interview. “It was also difficult knowing that my chance for being published depended on the shifting moods and opinions of a handful of slush readers, agents, and editors who basically answer to a marketing department with a limited budget. That’s sort of silly to me.”

With independent digital publishing, Lewis makes the decisions around his book’s content and the way in which it is sold and marketed. It’s a model that makes sense: the work is the product of his business. Why give the power of CEO over to another party — not least one who will leave you with 8% or less of the revenue?

“I receive the lion’s share of the revenue — up to 70% compared to as little as 8% with a traditional publisher. The only people I have to impress are readers, and so far the reviews for my books (from complete strangers all over the world) have been pretty darn good,” he says.

One of the great business advantages that authors who publish digitally have over their traditional counterparts, according to Lewis, is the ability to move fast and frequently. Lewis can publish a book within mere hours of the final edit on a manuscript via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes and a variety of other online retailers, though it will take 24 to 48 hours for them to appear for sale.

Lewis can update the book several times a week, testing different covers and marketing copy, and including things like maps or a sample chapter from a sequel — the sort of rapid iteration that’s simply not achievable with print books. Once they’re off the press and in the reader’s hands, the text is static.

But running active promotions isn’t the key to success, says Lewis. With any business, you need some sort of way to spread the news: word of mouth from an army of friends and family, elaborate advertising campaigns, Branson-esque stunts. Once you have the momentum going, though, promotions don’t do much for sales: Lewis says you may see a brief spike, but there’s very little measurable long-term game to be had from the fire-sale approach.

What does work, he says, is churning out quality work. “The best marketing you can do is to write another book,” says Lewis.

There is a launch process that Lewis goes through each time he publishes a new book. He updates his website and blog with information about the book, which includes links to retailers. He creates book pages on LibraryThing and Goodreads, where Lewis says many of his reviews come from.

Finally, he sends out some announcements — an email release to his mailing list, and a few on various forums such as Mobilereads and Kindleboards for good measure.

The kicker? The entire process of launching a book from start to finish takes him a couple of hours. After that, he’s free to celebrate or get started on the next work. It’s a stark contrast compared with the slow, cumbersome plodding of traditional publishing — and before you ask, there’s no difference in quality between Lewis’ work and the best of bookstore fiction. It’s as good as it gets.

“I’ve avoided most of the online debates about independent publishing and focused on just doing my work and making new friends (writers and readers alike). I’m not here to wage a culture war, just to write stories and help other writers if I can,” says Lewis. “I’ve noticed that quite a few successful indie authors actually have very little online presence, often going without blogs or Facebook pages. Success really does depend on the quality of your books and not on your skills as a salesperson. Which is a huge relief to me!”

There’s still plenty of change that needs to happen in the digital publishing space to make it a sustainable industry. E-readers like the Kindle, which are essentially single-function devices, need to become cheaper. The act of reading on smartphones and tablets, though a long way from where it was just a short year ago, needs to continue its climb. The pricing model amongst digital publishers is a matter of much debate, and that’s one area where Lewis believes publishers need to come to collectively establish a model before consumers, en-masse, will have faith in the stability of the digital publishing industry.

Lewis says we need less DRM, more format flexibility, and few obstacles to international publishing. It’s often difficult for US authors to distribute internationally through the same retailers that sell their work at home. It’s even harder for international publishers to have their work appear in the Amazon Kindle store, for instance: even a solo, impoverished writer getting his bearings has to register a business entity in the US — an expensive and difficult task for a foreigner.

“And critically, we need readers to remain open-minded about independent books and authors in general. There is still some lingering stigma that self-published books are rubbish (and some are, but so are some traditionally published books). In the end, books are books and only readers can decide which ones they like,” says Lewis.

The big question is: will Lewis ever go with a traditional publisher? Right now he’s reaping rewards from his published works, works that couldn’t have been published without mediums that bypass traditional channels. But what happens when the growth of his business hits a critical mass that is simply too time-consuming and distracting from the work of writing?

“Second, there will probably always be authors who prefer to have a team of experts doing the publishing work for them so they can focus on writing. Amanda Hocking is a great example. She became so successful as an independent that it made sense for her to turn over the publishing work to St Martins to allow her to focus on writing. And assuming she has a good lawyer and signed a good contract, I think that’s a very reasonable business decision.”

Lewis isn’t done yet — not by a long shot. A few days ago, he released his newest book The Broken Sword, a sequel to The Burning Sky. The third book which will form the endpiece for Lewis’ Halcyon trilogy will be out later this year.

Lewis is publishing a series of short stories called The Tale of Asha, about two women solving paranormal medical mysteries in India, and working on a fairy tale for his daughter, a work inspired by The Last Unicorn but reminiscent in motive of Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

Most exciting — at least to me, a big fan of Lewis’ hard sci-fi novel Heirs of Mars — are hints of a sequel to come next winter.

Joseph Lewis hits the nail on the head when he sums up the advantages of the digital publishing game, which has the capacity to allow more players to profit sustainably from smaller niches.

“I may never be rich or famous, but I’m doing much better now on my own than I ever was trying to break into the industry. And I literally have the rest of my life to continue building on my successes. I’ll never be bumped off the virtual shelves to make room for another author. There’s room for everyone now.”

The Internet has made the marginal cost of data transmission zero for all intents and purposes. This change didn’t come overnight, of course, but in pieces over the past two decades.

There were two major limiting factors that held back the potential of the Internet for longer than was anticipated during the great bubble days of the 90s: the price of flexible, reliable hosting, and limited penetration of ample consumer bandwidth. The cost of data transmission is both a corporate and a consumer question.

If companies could send unlimited data for free, but consumers could only accept it at a rate of 28 baud, data transmission would, in fact, be quite expensive and slow, with the consumer acting as the restrictive party. However, over the past five years, both data hosting and transmission technologies have markedly improved. When viewed in conjunction with a rise in consumer broadband penetration, both sides of the equation have finally met in the middle. The marginal cost for companies to send and for consumers to accept any specific additional packet of data has finally reached a cost of nearly zero.

This incredibly low cost of data transfer has caused all sorts of pandemonium, chaos that has largely in the favor of the consumer. In the past, companies often benefited from expensive data transfer, as it naturally restricted consumer access to data sources, and therefore prevented users from blazing their own trails. Effective monopolies were kept in place at strong margins. As both sides of the marginally free data transfer equation came into being for average users on the Internet, power shifted to the consumer to select, curate, pirate, and sample data at their own will and pace.

The effects have been transformative. We have seen the decline and fall of Big Music as an institution, demoted from its throne to its current status as merely one way to reach the masses with new music. Cheap digital distribution broke the back of CD sales. As a result, new bands have begun to eschew record labels and odious contract terms in favor of going off on their own, selling their music through every online distribution channel and expanding their revenues in the bargain.

With the fall in bandwidth costs, we’ve also seen a commensurate fall among traditional print media sources. Cheaper data transmission rates mean that a profusion of online voices can take their place in public discourse. With the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, print media has also seen its role as a news source become greatly diminished in the face of an army of bloggers reporting on the news as it happens

The next act in this massive deconstruction of legacy industry due to free data transmission is already being written, and this time it is the world of books that is in turmoil.

Book publishing has been fundamentally broken for as long as anyone can recall. To summarize for the uninitiated, this is the route that a normal new author would take if they wanted to publish a new work of fiction today:

The author would write a book. This can take several years. Then they would hunt for an agent. This could take a year, if it happened it all. Then the agent would have to shop the book. This again could take several years, if it worked at all. Finally, if a deal was struck, a new author could expect an advance of $5,000, which they would be unlikely to earn out, for their novel. Years and years of work, $5,000 reward.

Non-fiction has always been a different beast, but the process has a similar process.

In the same way as the rise of bands using self-published music selling services such as TuneCore on iTunes, and new blogs turning into major publications in the face of storied news groups, so too is the transition to marginal free data transport attacking old foundations in the book world.

Indie publishing, the act of an individual person publishing a book, is not a new concept. In fact, for the last several decades such activities have been panned as ‘self-publishing,’ and dealt with an attached stigma that labeled any self-published author as second-tier, and not quite good enough to find a ‘real publisher.’

This is changing. As we saw before, the methods that were used to source and develop talent in the world of big publishing were ineffective, and inefficient, requiring up to a half decade of work for a slim chance at a possible major reward. This has left many good authors on the outside looking in, and due to the commercial demands of keeping such massive corporate edifices in the black, allowed many poor authors into the fold due to their commercial potential.

But for those left out, either because their work was too niche to warrant a large print run or a contract from a NY publisher, or because the author simply didn’t have the luck of the draw, there was nothing but a poor option. Self-publishing, their refuge, was stuck in the world of analog data transfer: print. Thus the self-published author had to work in the world of physical books, an expensive operation at scale, and one that is suffocating in small batches. This left self-publishing with a sharp, negative social impact, and a poor bottom line.

For years, therefore, self-publishing was unattractive. This is no longer the case as the Kindle has changed everything.

Of course there are now a selection of quality e-readers the market: the Nook, the Kindle, and iBooks to start. In fact, the Nook platform has now managed to secure 25% of the digital market. But what they all share is the ability for an individual author to publish their work cheaply, quickly, and with a high profit margin.

If you reflect for a moment, each of those qualities was lacking from the old days of print-based self-publishing. As a result, authors are flocking to these services in droves, excited that the marketplace that was kept from them for so long is now open.

Books that have been stuck on hard drives for years, as their respective authors hunted down publishing deals, are now being set loose onto the market in droves. For the author, and for the adventurous reader, times are quite good indeed.

But what about the authors that have already ‘made it?’ Surely those authors who have broken into the rarefied circle of NY publishing are happy to stay put? Interestingly, this is increasingly not the case. Why? Money.

Remember that the bane of the self-publishing author, and big the advantage of the publishing house, is print. Small runs for self-publishers were so expensive that profit even on complete sell-through was always doomed to be small. Meanwhile the big publishing houses could take advantage of economies of scale to cheaply print off thousands of profitable copies.

But as sales have switched from print copies to electronic ones, as demonstrated by rapidly expanding e-book sales according to industry sources, print is rapidly losing its sheen. And as it loses its glow, so do the big publishing houses. After all, print was their area of expertise, their raison d’etre, their advantage over the individual.

To prove that this is the case, we must show a popular, traditionally-published author turning down a new print deal for a massive dollar amount. Do you think that there is such a case? Indeed, here is an example. You can read the full story of Barry Eisler saying no to a $500,000, two book deal here if you are so inclined, but let’s merely take the point and move on.

Authors, big and small, print experience or not, previously self-published or not, are now moving to independently publishing their work on electronic platforms, without the need of a publisher.

We’ll ask the quality question in a minute, but let’s go back to the cash question first. What percent of the sale of an ebook does an author receive under current publishing contracts? Around 17%. If that author self-published, the author could earn 70% of the sale, and set their own price. That is the crux of the difference between the two models. In the words of J.A. Konrath:

No, they’re not. Editing and good covers are essential, and these can be procured for set costs. They aren’t worth the 52.5% a publisher takes, forever.

Surely it must be argued that if digital platforms have been opened to everyone, the crap will start to flow, right? Think back to our discussion of what books were allowed to go to print, and that many were let in not for quality, but for their commercial potential. This meant that poor-quality works were often published, in the place of what could have been more quality works on the grounds that these books had a higher potential profit. Even more, as the sales of print books have suffered due to the shuttering of bookstores and the rising consumer preference for digital books, budgets for new books at major publishing houses have slipped, lowering the quality of the art and editorial inputs that are offered to upcoming works.

But all we have shown thus far is that the old world of print was not completely effective at keeping out poor texts. The real question is how will indie published books avoid descending into the muck, with everyone publishing half-baked, poorly edited schlock? In short, many weak books will be published, but a different gatekeeper will seperate the wheat from the chaff: the reader. Instead of appealing to a publisher for a print deal, in hopes of reaching a reader, the modern author can write whatever they see fit, publish it when they wish, and then the potential end reader will vet the work and only purchase what they deem worthy. Readers have always done this, of course, at the bookstore looking down aisles of books, but in the digital world shelf space is infinite, so the work might be slightly more taxing.

Couldn’t the major publishers offer better terms to their current authors and keep them from going out on their own for future books? Not with their current overhead structure. A single author can hire an editor, hire an artist, hire a formatting genius, and prepare their book for publishing for only a few thousand dollars. Then from that moment on all revenue and profit is theirs. What NY publisher could ever offer such terms?

In fact, in light of indie publishing phenom Amanda Hocking taking a $1 million dollar deal for her next few books, many indie publishing firebrands have boldly proclaimed that “Amanda Hocking is Probably Making a Mistake.” Three years ago no one would have ever scoffed at a seven figure deal.

Some defenders of conventional model publishing assert that publishing houses provide other services, such as marketing. Surely that will keep some authors in the fold? Some, yes, but not all. Again, as total revenues from print books have declined, so have advertising and promotional budgets. This is even more painfully true for new authors. Often there is no budget at all, only some advice for the new writer to use social media to push their book and to ‘work it.’

A short aside before we conclude: it is no longer as difficult for an author striking out on their own to sell print copies of their books. There are a variety of print-on-demand services that are quite capable. However, most indies are seeing much more success with digital books, as they can be priced very competitively. Still, the indie author has all options open to them.

This is the bottom line: the economics of publishing were always weak, but there was no way around the necessity of print, and that meant that publishers ran the show. With digital books now a one billion dollar market (2011 forecast based on current monthly sales rates), there is enough space for anyone with enough pluck to go out on their own and take a chance at self-publishing. The best will bring their fans from print to digital, leaving their old legacy publishers, and their low royalties behind, and the young, new authors can reach readers without the need to ask for perrmission.

It is a brave new world, one that the Internet in all its glory has brought to us.

Was there a Kindle or iPad under your Christmas tree? Statistics point to yes!

Publisher’s Weekly is reporting preliminary estimates from the Association of American Publishers that e-book sales from 16 reporting companies jumped 115.8% this January, totaling $69.9 million in the U.S.

And it’s bad news for paperback book publishers. Paperbacks were down 30.9% from the reporting companies, falling to $39.0 million, $30 million below the sales of e-books. Hardcover sales fell 11.3% in January.

At the end of January, we reported that Kindle e-books sales had overtaken paperback books on Amazon.com. We’ve been tracking the rise of e-books over the past few years, and so while we’re not altogether surprised by this announcement, it’s a massive milestone.

What’s happening? The way we devour content is changing. We no longer want to commute or travel with big, paper bound books when we can simply tote along a Kindle. Reading isn’t dying though, far from. Think of all the different kinds of information you consume, reading while waiting for the subway train, in line at the grocery store, on your computer at work and curled up at night in bed on the iPad. The iPad, the Kindle, these are devices of leisure. They’re large enough to consume Tolstoy but small enough to slip into our purse.

If you’re interested in getting involved in the eBook scene, be sure to read up on EBookling, the disruptive darling of indie online book publishing.

At first it was just an experiment. Blake Crouch, a mystery and suspense novelist, was not lacking for a traditional book publisher. His last few novels were put out by St. Martin’s Press and he has a literary agent dedicated to selling the rights to his work. But early last year, intrigued by success stories with Amazon’s Kindle store, he decided to release a collection of his short stories as an ebook without the aid of a publisher.

Though sales started off slow — maybe a few hundred a month — within the last two months he’s been averaging 5,000 purchases a month. With his 70% cut from Amazon, that means a $2.99 ebook has generated upwards of $10,000 a month, money that bypasses a traditional publisher completely and goes straight to his pocket. Five thousand sales a month, he told me in a phone interview, “is far more than I’ve sold traditionally.”

Crouch is among a growing list of authors who are forgoing the traditional publisher route to sell their work directly to consumers. Though self-publishing is nothing new — it has long been referred to as “vanity publishing,” typically a disparaging term — the rise of the ebook market has allowed authors to eliminate the high infrastructure costs of a print product. A typical print run of a few thousand books can cost a vanity publisher a hefty five figures, whereas the actual publishing of an ebook (not including the production costs) amounts to virtually nothing.

The ebook also allows authors to skip over other hurdles, including the very cold reality that most offline retailers won’t stock a self-published book on their shelves. Though online retailers like the Kindle and Nook stores can still give preferential treatment for major publishers, they’re able to provide a wide swath of inventory from the long tail.

Sales

Recent figures released by Amazon indicate that its ebooks are now outselling their print counterparts. Most the top sellers in the Kindle store also have print editions, but there are dozens of “indie” authors who are selling thousands of ebooks a month without a print version. Most the authors I spoke to for this article noticed a drastic increase in sales in the last few months, but none of them knew exactly why. “Something happened after the new year,” Crouch said. “I don’t know if it’s because more people purchased ereaders or what. But in January sales almost doubled what they were in December, and it was just a huge upswing.”

A paranormal and erotic romance author named Tina Folsom had tried for years to land a literary agent and traditional publisher to no avail. Almost on a whim she decided early last year to begin uploading some of her novels to various ebook platforms. Sales, at first, were slow — perhaps only a few hundred a month. But then suddenly in October she sold over a thousand titles. In December it jumped up to 11,000, and in January she sold 27,000 ebooks (February, a shorter month, clocked in around 22,000).

But why did sales increase so drastically?

“I’m not 100% sure,” Folsom told me in a phone interview. “There were certainly different levels [of sales] at the beginning. I started making better covers for my books, so that made a big difference. My blurbs describing my books had a really good hook, and that certainly helped. I went around a lot of blogs as well, approaching paranormal romance blogs or vampire blogs to try to get my books reviewed, because obviously there are very few sites that will actually review self published books.

“So it took awhile to get some people interested. It started rolling a little more in October or so when I started seeing a little more of an increase. By December I already had people emailing me asking when I had the next book coming out in the series. It sounded like people were already waiting for the third book and when the third book came out, the next day my sales doubled, which was surprising. I hadn’t thought it would go that fast.”

The work involved

Just because the cost of distribution has been eliminated doesn’t mean that there isn’t real work involved in creating a finished ebook product. Most print publishers spend months producing a book, a process that includes revision, copy editing, formatting, jacket copy, and cover design. Eliminating the publisher from the equation means the author has to take on all these burdens.

“With ebooks you’re there from the ground level, and it is very taxing,” Crouch explained. “You have to have it formatted. I work with a wonderful cover artist who does all the cover art for my ebooks, and he’s worked on developing a brand with me over the last year. It was a no brainer for him to do this. And then there’s a lot of metadata in terms of loading all these to the various platforms; it’s not just Kindle, it’s Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Sony, and the Apple iBooks store. There are the library lending programs, which I’m just starting to explore. It is a lot of work and there is definitely a place for someone to come along in the ebook revolution and step in and assist writers.”

Some of these indie authors are successful enough to “farm out” a lot of the production work to other people. Folsom pays a person to illustrate her covers, and not only has she hired a copy editor to line edit her upcoming books, but the editor is also going back and editing her already-published titles for errors. Up until recently she had split her time between writing, editing, and her day job, but she quit the day job and the production assistance she farms out allows her to spend most of her time writing.

Pricing

One point of contention for many indie authors is pricing. Amazon allows authors to choose their own prices, giving them a 70% royalty on all ebooks sold over $2.99 and taking a much steeper cut for books sold for less than that. This has created two factions: those who price their books above $2.99 and those who set the marker extremely low at, say, 99 cents. Both Crouch and Folsom think the 99 cent authors are not only devaluing their own work, but other ebooks as well.

“I hate that,” Crouch said. “I think you can sell a lot of books at 99 cents, but I don’t necessarily think you’ll make new fans. I think a lot of people buy this new technology and just cruise the top 100 [sellers], and at 99 cents that’s total impulse; you might just pick up 30 titles. Whether or not they actually read those is a real question. I price most my longer work, like novels or short story collections, at $2.99 or higher. I will price my individual short stories at 99 cents because that’s a fair price and it’s a gateway to the rest of my work. I can’t justify selling my novels for 99 cents.”

Folsom takes a similar approach, pricing her short stories at 99 cents and her novels much higher. In fact she goes above the $2.99 threshold, charging between $4.99 and $5.99. But whatever the price, there’s little doubt that the author’s cut will be much higher than what he or she would receive with a traditional publisher; in most cases a writer will only see 10-20% of the cover price. At 70%, Folsom will take home upwards of $4.20 for ever copy sold.

What about the publishing houses?

So where does this leave the traditional publishers? Will companies like HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster be able to lure these indie authors under their wings? Crouch seemed ambivalent on this question, saying his agent is still shopping around his proposals to the New York houses.

“The royalty rate right now for ebooks that publishers are offering is 25% and that’s horrendously in favor of the publisher, because ebooks are pretty much becoming the preferred format of reading,” he said. “That’s a huge downgrade in royalty rate. I really can’t see a scenario where I’d be involved with a traditional publisher unless the terms were pretty stellar, honestly. They’d have to be really fair.”

I asked whether a publisher would allow the author to keep the e-rights so that it could produce a print product, but Crouch was highly doubtful. “I’d love to do that, but up until this point no publisher has even considered giving any author the e-rights. There are authors walking away from book deals right now under that very deal point. They want to keep the e-rights and the publisher doesn’t want to give them. And of course they don’t want to give them; e-rights are the most valuable subset of a book property right now.”

Folsom was more blunt in responding to how she’d deal with the very same publishers who had rejected her work in the past. “They would have to pay me a very high amount,” she said. “We’re not even talking a low six figure income. If they wanted my three-book vampire series, a quarter of a million dollars wouldn’t even do it, because I can make more than that in a year on those three books. ”

This is not to say steering clear of the big publishers doesn’t cause complications. So far, Folsom has not been able to sell the foreign rights to her work, meaning right now she can only market her books to an English-speaking audience. “We cannot get anyone to buy our foreign rights. I’ve emailed agents, tons of them. The response I get is, ‘Well, if you’re not also interested in selling your US e-rights, then I can’t represent you.’ I’ve even contacted foreign rights agents directly who don’t deal with domestic issues and even those are rejecting us. They say if they can’t go to a publisher abroad and say that you’ve been published with Random House, or Penguin, or wherever, then they’re not going to be interested.”

Without the collective bargaining power of a major publisher, an indie author may also have less clout with those companies distributing their books. Folsom told me that Barnes & Noble’s Nook store unexpectedly ceased offering free sample chapters for self-published erotica novels last week. This means that a potential reader could no longer read a few pages of the author’s work before deciding whether to purchase it. The effect on sales, Folsom said, was devastating; she saw a 35% drop overnight. So far, Barnes & Noble has not explained why this option has been removed for indie authors, but erotica published by traditional publishers has remained untouched.

Most the indie authors I’ve come across sell the overwhelming majority of their ebooks on the Amazon Kindle, but for some reason romance writers have found success on the Nook. Folsom sees the majority of her sales coming from there. According to a recent CNET article, the Nook has captured 25% of the US ebook market, a fairly sizable chunk in a niche with a growing list of competitors. Despite predictions that the iPad would wipe out Kindle sales, the authors I interviewed said they weren’t seeing significant revenue from the Apple device.

***

Whenever an article appears touting the success of a few self-published authors, there’s a certain amount of pushback from critics who seek to ground us in reality, pointing out that the overwhelming majority of writers who self-publish don’t see significant sales. Perhaps this is where the big publishers can still fit in by separating the wheat from the chaff. And a lower barrier of entry for the ebook market means a lot more chaff than ever before.

“Amazon’s Kindle store is overloaded right now with a bunch of folks who think they can publish their high school diary and make a lot of money,” said Crouch. “And that stuff flops down. My concern is it’s going to be harder to find the good stuff, and I think there’s going to have to be some kind of push, whether it’s a writers collective or whether this is spearheaded by agents or distributors who can group known quantities together and brand them with some logo that denotes quality. Just to give the reader help in sorting through all of the millions of books that are infiltrating the Kindle system.”

But those who have found the sweet spot in sales are not looking back. In a widely circulated blog post, author Joe Konrath meticulously detailed his history with traditional publishing, listing the painstaking efforts he made to sell as many print copies of his books as possible. He traveled thousands of miles, gave up sleep, hounded booksellers, and threw himself at every person who would potentially buy his book. The account is exhausting just to read. All that changed, however, with the rise of the ebook. What used to take eight weeks to sell 5,000 books took him only a few days on the Kindle store. With this success, he has vowed to put all the promotional sweat work behind him. He’ll no longer attend conventions, book signings, or even grant interviews to journalists.

Sure enough, when I contacted Konrath for this article, his response was polite but firm; “I’ve stopped doing interviews,” he wrote. Most book authors would jump at the chance for free publicity, but true to his word, Konrath would not bite. With the huge market the Kindle store had created, he no longer needed people like me. He now has one job and one job only: to write fiction.

To us, it all sounds like a cross between existing tablet magazines and a Flipboard-style, customisable service. Here’s how Yahoo describes it:

Livestand is a digital newsstand that’s always fresh and effortlessly personalized. Sit back and enjoy the news, entertainment, and local information you love, right on your tablet. The more you use it, the more it gets to know you.

According to MocoNews, the project has been in development for a year and promises to offer more than just magazines in digitised form. Rich media and interactivity beyond merely commenting are both features being discussed.

Yahoo will offer Livestand as a portal for existing publishers to offer their magazines in digital form. Interestingly, in addition to the large publishers that you might expect, Yahoo will also be encouraging small, independent publishers to upload content to the platform.

Discussing the personalisation features on its own blog, Yahoo says: “As the premier digital media company, we see a clear opportunity to push the boundaries of personalization to deliver intelligent experiences specifically tailored for each individual.  This ultra personalized content experience is our vision for Livestand from Yahoo! – a digital newsstand, delivering a wealth of ever-changing content from multiple publishers, continuously programmed by a person’s interests and contexts.”

The approach to personalisation is intriguing, with customisation based on your interests, your location and even the time of day.

By announcing this now, Yahoo is heading off Google, said to be planning its own digital news stand offering in the near future.

There’s no release date for Livestand as yet, but the platform’s website says it’s coming soon. Yahoo also offers a Facebook page, which will keep you updated if you’re interested in learning more.

With advertising annoying the life out of us, it is easy to see why services like Readability and its comrades Instapaper and Read it Later are becoming popular. These sites remove all the clutter around websites so that you, the reader, can get to the text without have to duck-and-dive your way through the adverts, and read it wherever you choose.

Instapaper, which is one of the most popular services to bookmark posts on the web to read later, has partnered up with Readability. Readability is similar to Instapaper however it asks for a donation of $5 or above to gain access to the site. The subscription fee is monthly and 70% of the donation is distributed to the site publishers who install a simple “Read Now/Read Later” button on their pages.

How Readability works: You’re asked to make an account and then directed to Amazon payments. The donation of $5 and up is then taken from you at the end of the month. There is no fee for the product itself. Once your account is created you can add publications to your reading list.  The adverts are removed, leaving behind the text. There is a handy personalization feature where you can chose the text size.

Readability provides an interesting solution to the monetization problem of publishers. And to help the publishing ecosystem and distribution of Readabilty, the founder of Instapaper Marco Arment, who previously lead developer at Tumblr, announced on his blog today that Instapaper will be developing and powering the Readability mobile and tablet apps. Arment, who is also an advisor for Readability, also announced that Instapper will soon provide an option to send logs of your reading activity to your Readability account.

Readability is aimed at helping readers and publishers. However what will happen to my paid subscriptions? Will I have to pay twice? Additionally will Readability be partnering with other easy-reading-services like Read it Later? Or will this partnership only extend to companies in which it has an active role in? How will site publishers react with the loss of advertising revenue? The other area of contemplation is that Readability and sites like it, do not have comments, I as a reader find comments engaging and often spend as much time reading the article as I do reading the comments.

TNW will be getting our own Readbility button soon, make sure to add us to your list.

News is changing – quickly. The way it’s researched, the way it’s reported and the way we access it are all evolving rapidly. 2010 could well be remembered as a key year in the history of online news. Here are the key reasons why.

The iPad effect

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in January, it kickstarted a year of rapid experimentation as news publishers hunted for a way to capitalise on this fresh take on tablet computing.

Many newspapers were quick to launch dedicated iPad apps, sometimes at prices higher than print subscriptions. There was evidence that publishers were charging much higher rates to advertise on tablet devices, too. In some cases, such as The Financial Times, the gamble seemed to pay off handsomely.

Meanwhile, Apple seemed a little more lenient in its taste and decency rules as it looked to accommodate major news publishers’ content in the app store. Some apps, including the UKs The Sun, were allowed to feature photos of topless women – usually a real no-no in the ultra-clean world of Apple.

The iPad was such a hit with news publishers that as the year drew towards its close, Rupert Murdoch was staffing up an iPad-only newspaper called The Daily to launch in early 2011. However, the idea drew criticism from some for its “Old Media” way of thinking. The Daily will reportedly update once per day like a paper newspaper, so don’t go expecting to get late breaking news for your expected 99 cents per issue.

In the magazine world, iPad editions ranged from little more than PDF versions of print magazines to interactive extravaganzas like the app from Wired. Towards the end of the year, Richard Branson launched an iPad-only magazine while independent publication TRVL points towards future success for independent publishers in the field.

Paywalls

After years of offering open access to content, declining revenues forced some news publishers to act in 2010, with paywalls being the most popular option for monetising their online news.

The most high profile paywall launches of the year came from Rupert Murdoch’s News International in the UK. First The Times and Sunday Times, then The News of the World began to charge for access. At the same time, Murdoch waged a war against news aggregators like NewsNow and accused search engines like Google of “Taking stories for nothing”. Seemingly Murdoch doesn’t know how the Internet works.

Expect more paywalls in 2011. The New York Times website is expected to start charging for access to its content early in the new year. Let’s hope it’s a little more successful than fellow Big Apple publication Newsday, which revealed this year that it had sold just 35 subscriptions to its paywalled site in three months. Ouch.

Wikileaks

Wikileaks didn’t just provide news gatherers with near endless stories from its leaked documents and drama from the private life of founder Julian Assange, it demonstrated a change in the way journalism worked.

US media watcher Jay Rosen went so far as to call Wikileaks “The first stateless news organisation”. Why? It’s shown that documents don’t have to be leaked to a single journalist; they can be spread far and wide, potentially expanding their impact a thousandfold. While Wikileaks worked with traditional news outlets to identify headline grabbing stories from the mass of data it had in the US diplomatic cables and Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, anyone could do their own research and identify their own stories from the data.

While Wikileaks’ own future hangs in the balance at the end of 2010, Openleaks is a project that may take the idea to the next level in 2011. Created by defectors from Wikileaks, the service will be a platform that will allow anyone to securely send a leak to someone who will find it useful – not just to those in the media. This not only changes the future direction of news gathering, it potentially changes the way we communicate forever.

Twitter

Twitter continued to develop as both a place to make and break news during 2010. Every day of the year seemed to bring more stories sourced from tweets. While much of it was celebrity tittle-tattle, Twitter became an important outlet for official statements. Wikileaks’ account was one of the most famous examples, being the main daily mouthpiece of the organisation. Meanwhile, we saw more politicians join the service as the importance of tweeting became increasingly recognised.

As the year drew to a close, tweeting from the courtroom became an officially acceptable way of reporting on court proceedings in the UK. However, journalists tweeting their own opinions from their personal accounts faced trouble in some quarters. For example, a CNN reporter in the Middle East was fired for expressing her own feelings in a tweet.

Twitter itself launched a special guide to Twitter for the media this year and its founders stated that Twitter isn’t a social network but is instead for sharing news, content and information. All this helped lead us to conclude that Twitter is gearing itself up to become the defining media company of the new decade.

Hyperlocal

“Hyperlocal” news sites expanded rapidly in 2010, both small-scale independent blogs and corporate networks like AOL’s Patch. Sitting somewhere in the middle, Neighborhoodr is a blog network built using Tumblr. Blogs are set up for sixty NYC neighborhoods and local residents can freely submit news stories from their area to be approved by a team of moderators.

Questions remain over whether hyperlocal news can work as a viable business. Reports of sweatshop-style 70-hour working weeks and entrepreneurial journalists struggling to make money mean that the future is far from certain for current approaches to the idea.

Experiments in online news in 2010

The great thing about online news is that it allows a ‘playground’ approach, with publishers and developers able to experiment with new ways of presenting the stories we consume.

The Guardian’s API bore some interesting fruit this year. Today’s Guardian is a website that re-imagines the newspaper’s stories in a “frictionless” format. Displaying a story at a time, it’s a refreshingly simple way of consuming online news. Your only decision on each page is “Should I read this or move on?”, with none of the distracting bells and whistles of a normal news website.

The idea of sharing news stories in real time as you read them was toyed with a couple of times during the year. UK startup Readness excited us with its “Last.fm for news” service but sadly it couldn’t get the funding it needed to continue. Another Guardian API project has developed the idea in a slightly different direction with The Social Guardian, which allows you to see what people you follow on Twitter are reading on the site in real time.

Following on from our article reporting that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had signed a book deal with both UK and US publishers to write his autobiography, we can now tell you the deal will be worth as much as $1.5 million.

Assange, speaking with the Sunday Times, said the money would be used to defend himself against allegations of sexual assault, a legal case that currently means the Wikileaks founder is living under strict bail conditions following his release from jail ten days ago.

“I don’t want to write this book, but I have to,” Assange said. “I have already spent 200,000 pounds for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.”

As a result of the deal, Assange will receive $800,000 fro Alfred A. Knopf, his American publisher as well as £325,000 from Canongate, his UK publisher. Money from other markets could increase the total to £1.1 million.

With many financial institutions freezing any payments to the whistleblowing website, Assange is having to find alternative avenues to finance Wikileaks. By writing his autobiography, Assange will receive the money directly, financing his legal costs and also giving him funds to help to keep Wikileaks online.

Assange will be back in court for the full hearing on the Swedish extradition request starting February 7.