The Wall Street Journal’s online edition has posted an article announcing a major move by HarperCollins further into the world of digital publishing. The publisher, part of the News Corp empire, has bought an equity position in Newstand Inc, a closely-held company that owns LibreDigital, which digitizes, warehouses and distributes books via the Web.
The WSJ reports some amazing statistics. HarperCollins has already digitized 12,000 of its own titles, 2000 of which are already available online. The publisher owns about 20,000 older titles and publishes about 3500 new titles a year.
HarperCollins is not alone in its move into digital publishing. Simon & Schuster intends to have about 12,000 of its books digitized by the end of this year. Random House has been active in the area since the late 1990’s.
Small publishers are likely to follow suit. Both HarperCollins and Random House intend to offer digital services to small publishers who cannot afford to do it on their own. The HarperCollins digital service, for example, will cover all aspects of publishing a book.
These developments raise interesting questions for authors. Yes, the major publishers, and even the smaller ones, can bring credibility to authors and their books. They also can, if they choose, promote books and authors. However, writers increasingly have the tools to produce digital books on their own. And distribution channels — think Amazon and Lulu, for example — are opening up for enterprising authors.
Part of our challenge, as writers, is to follow these developments and, perhaps, to learn the steps to digital publishing. BECOMING A WRITER–SERIOUSLY will be heading down this track in future posts.
For the full WSJ article, go to:
NOTE: I received notice of this article from the Daily Newsfeed from MediaBistro.com, a source which I consider indispensible for writers of all stripes. I will soon post a full review of this source.
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