Web 2.0 platforms continue to shake all verticals in the business world. The book publishing world, still vibrating from wikis and blogs, should prepare for another potential quake. WEbook has hit the ground.
Infamous for being reject-ful, spiteful and outright mean to up-and-coming authors and content creators, the old-world book-publishing elite have amalgamated into a handful of power silos that choose which books to print and how long they should remain in print. They decide the books you and I have access to in our local book stores but they’d tell us that market conditions dictate this. I may not want to read a book about brain surgery, but I’m sure glad it’s in print for the few hundred who would.
Nowadays, many of us turn to the internet to find something beyond the publisher’s idea of what we might like. WEbook is taking it a step further. WEbook is a disruptive little online publishing community which may have found a bottom-up way around a top-down publishing bureaucracy. Their model houses a community of writers and readers who collaborate, create and democratize the selection process for the books that will actually be published and ultimately purchased.
From founder Itai Kohavi
“WEbook is a platform where passionate writers from different countries and diverse walks of life come together to create engaging works of writing. The community votes for its favorites and we publish and sell those works both in print and digitally as WEbooks, while sharing 50% of the profits with the creators of the books.” (quote source)
Not bad at all. The radical trust notion of sharing content before it’s purchased is another brassy move in this dusty business. With multiple revenue streams – including the obvious sales of books, pay-for-services, premium subscriptions and online media for sale – there’s potential for this idea to be very disruptive to the “no-school” publishing glitterati.
I know what you’re thinking… is this another dotcom bubble?
Itai’s response:
“Well, in the middle of a bubble there’s empty air, and the same bubble can blow up only once. The internet today is much more like the big bang theory, it’s a mass of content that expands quickly in all directions and no one knows whether it will ever stop and how.” (quote source)
And how. But will it work? Another round of books are due out early 2009.
We shall see.
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One Response to “WEbook: Collaborative Publishing”
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September 12th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Colin
A couple days ago I stopped by Radical Trust, and saw an amazing quote at the top of the page about social media being the best tool of democracy since the ballet box. I love that. Our democracy has for so long been dominated by elite minorities (Like old school book publishers), controlling and leading us to distractions (Like the NHL), or pre-approved sources of media propaganda (Like the majority of what we read or see in most places off line).
Web 2.0, Crowdsourcing, social networking, social activism (like the facebook group Fair copyright for Canada), Blogging,etc. And now Webook! The peoples revolution is here, has been for a while, but steadily building momentum. Good Stuff C.
James