By Staff Writer –

Literary agent Andrew Wylie plans on producing e-book editions of his clients’ books that are not owned by old school publishers. And by doing that he’s backstabbing Random House by dealing straight with Amazon.

Everyone is mad and acting like a bunch of a**holes. The Author’s Guild has mixed feelings because it is strange that an agency is launching a digital publishing company and the whole business about launching an exclusive deal with Amazon just gives the online giant even more power. The situation is sticky and will take some time before it is worked out, if it ever is worked out, that is.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

“Even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books.”

The fact that Amazon sold more eBooks than print books is a good thing for eBooks. But it’s anyone’s guess exactly which reader or device will dominate the market. You could have the Kindle or the iPad argument all day.

There is one impressive startup in the book world: Open Road Integrated Media taps into the best in the world of publishing, marketing, and film.

Mediabistro reports:

The investment firm’s founder, Jim Kohlberg, had this statement: “With the convergence of expanding device options and the rapid adoption of ebooks, we strongly believe that the Open Road model and its team are uniquely positioned to succeed in the marketplace. We are pleased to continue our support through additional funding.”

Photo: goXunuReviews/ flickr

eBooks sell more than hardcover books, Amazon reports is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

Really amazing magazine writers get $3 a word. Newer writers get paid a $1.

Ummmmm, not anymore.

You can try pointing fingers, but the reality is that now we have websites that will pay writers hardly-livable wages.

The publishing industry is going through an evolution and nobody has figured out what a good business model is. So their solution is to cut the freelance budget. And the lucky ones who do get paid, get paid less.

The perfect editor-to-writer relationship can be substituted through online content farms such as Seed.com and Demand Media, thanks to the ease of distributing online content. The relationship is more straightforward. It’s a quick give and take ordeal, rather than the long courtship involved in developing a trusted relationship with editors.

As magazines are dying, Demand Media is thriving.  The company is providing a new platform for content production. The company has at its disposal 7,000 freelance writers, editors, and video producers to create 4,500 stories a day. When writers get paid $15 for an original story, this works out to 3 cents a word. In magazine talk, the story would have brought in $500.

The stories get placed into places like eHow, filling in the gap of how-to do stuff information. And writers who write for LiveStrong.com, get paid a little bit more. If Demand Media begins to partners with old school media companies, the writers might get more bang for their words.

Kris Smith, the senior editor of this site, calls this the rise of the content class. Smith says:

The consumption of digital media is beginning to explode as the gadget and tech culture is now gaining a foothold with the public at large. Millions of always on, always connected devices are sold every month to happy customers that want sports scores, entertainment, news and to find the Chipotle nearest them. The content vacuum starts here.

The Content Class will fill this void.

This begs the question: Will we all be content producers in the future? Journalists, please stand up. I hope we can find a business model that supports quality reporting and good writing. The world will be a richer place if we can write these narratives that mean something, instead of wasting our time producing content to satisfy the number of clicks we use to measure a story by.

People need to invest in journalism: “There’s no such thing as a free story.”

Image: flickr/ Mark Berry – Photographer and Graphic Designer

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Is Demand Media Headed Into The Land of Old Media? is a post from: TechStartups.com

Need more evidence that Amazon is gearing up for the Apple Tablet onslaught? Here you go.

Today, Amazon announced major changes to the royalty program for what it calls its “Kindle Digital Text Platform.” Starting June 30, 2010, publishers and authors will receive 70% of the revenue for each eBook sold.

That’s a big change from the current structure. In fact, that’s probably the inverse of the current structure, if not close to it.

But, like anything else, there are gotchas. You’ve got to play by Amazon’s rules and meet some specific criteria. First, delivery costs will now be paid by the publisher:

Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.

That’s actually less sticky than the rest of Amazon’s criteria:

• The list price of an ebook must be between $2.99 and $9.99
• This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book
• The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights
• The title must allow features such as text-to-speech, among other features, the list of which will grow over time.
• Books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. (How you determine “parity” on a unique work is another discussion altogether.)

The program will NOT be offered for books that are in the public domain (published before 1923) so all of you folks peddling your digital copies of “Think and Grow Rich” or “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” are out of luck.

This announcement is big for many reasons:

• It further cements the unofficially-official $9.99 price point for eBooks that has Big Publishings knickers in a bunch. Hopefully they will be satisfied with the new revenue share.
• It dictates the cost of the books physical equivalent. So now, not only is Amazon dictating the floor and ceiling for ebooks, but also for the dead tree editions.
• It ensures that the publisher will secure audio rights for the ebook, no longer allowing publishers to declare that the creepy electronic voice that reads to you a completely new work. Of course, you’ll still want to get the audio book if you intend to listen to the entire book.

I can’t wait to see how Big Publishing reacts.

[BusinessWire]

Disclosure of Material Connection: http://dsclzr.us/0

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Amazon Announces 70 Percent Royalty Program for Kindle Books, Many Strings Attached is a post from: TechStartups.com

I never thought in a million years that I’d ever say this: I wish I knew how to sew.

The pattern featured this week on Burdastyle is the Tikva Trench. The $6.50 pattern is so hot. “You never know if people are going to like it,” says BurdaStyles’ co-founder Nora Abousteit.

BurdaStyle is a good example of a user generated site. “People like sharing. We are getting high quality content,” she says. Women living in New York, London, and other fashion hubs typically spend time in this online sewing world. We upload a new design every week and users upload whenever they want to, says Abousteit.

The site has built a community of 276,900 members since its launch in 2007, and continues to grow online and offline. This spring, Abouseit launched 238 sewing clubs around the world to give members a chance to meet each other for real.

The concept began in Germany when Abousteit was working for the publishing house, Hubert Burda Media. She agreed to try to do something with the media giant’s sewing magazine. Abousteit began her research by surfing the Internet to gauge the sewing activities online. “I found that a lot of people were very passionate about that they are doing, but the information was scattered around on places like Flickr and blogs,” she says. Abousteit thought all these things should be combined, so she created a platform where people can work together.

The turning for the concept occurred on November 2, 2006. It’s a day Abousteit remembers well. She flew from Germany to New York for a photo shoot. “I extended my stay for 2 weeks, then extended it for another month. I’m still here. It’s a bit ridiculous but that’s the story of my life,” she says.

The site relaunched for the third time this past August and is now getting 300,000 unique visitors a month. BurdaStyle made the sewing patterns open source and removed the copyright from the design. “The patterns always stay fresh,” she says. A pattern can have up to two hundred different designs, when users add their personal touch.

The really ambitious users can use the patterns to create a clothing line and make money. But anyone can use the step-by-step guide to bring a design to life.

All you need to do is pay a few bucks, download the directions, and then print them out. At the fabric store, patterns are printed on large paper. “We are spitting up the designs so you can print them at home, and then you just assemble it like a puzzle. We offer step-by-step pictorials and also share techniques and tips,” she says.

Sewing has been a hobby for Abousteit since she was 14 years old. She took lessons from a seamstress. Back then, she was limited to the patterns at the fabric store. Using some creativity, she began sewing material over rubber bands and sold these as headbands at school. Now through BurdaStyle, Abousteit can see others create their own unique designs. Only this time, it’s open for the whole world to see.

Image: Danielle St. Laurent

BurdaStyle Makes Sewing Fashionable And Easy is a post from: TechStartups.com

Over the years of blogging I’ve created quite a bit of content with all that writing. The content on my personal site and the content I’ve written for another network are all available to me to use offline if I so desire. Zinepal now allows me to accomplish that task very easily.

Zinepal allows me to import an RSS feed, or a collection of feeds, into a format that I can then edit and tweak to create into what would be a familiar, offline magazine format.

I put the document illustrated above together with just a few mouse clicks and didn’t do any type of editing to the document whatsoever. As you can see, it’s pretty clean and straight-forward, but the possibilities are quite a bit more with some more time spent on the process.

After generating the content above by pulling in the details from my feed, I was able to preview the document as a PDF format and save it at that point if I so desired. I could select specific posts to not include or include if I wanted to customize my personal zine even more. Playing around with the custom feed options of WordPress to build a feed on a specific author or category would give me an even more personalized document to print and share offline with friends.

I’ve never liked the “zine” terminology for some reason, but the Zinepal service looks like a great start to what could be very useful option for sharing content with individuals that may never get the online opportunities of blogging.

If they work on improving their website interface to be a little more interesting and aesthetically pleasing I think they’ll be well on their way.

Zinepal Pushes Your Online Content Offline is a post from: TechStartups.com