Following up on the exciting news about the Bowker and Data Conversion Laboratory partnership this week, Beat Barblan met with GoodEReader to talk about its announcement that it is also partnering with Vook to bring authors and publishers together to release the ebook forms of their titles. While the DCL partnership allows invested parties to rely on its professional formatting capabilities, the ability to work with Vook will offer authors a more in-depth, supported publishing experience.
Barblan explained Bowker’s initial involvement with these partners as a way to help smaller entities compete more effectively in the book market; as so many customers begin their involvement in publishing by seeking out Bowker as a source of ISBN numbers, the next logical step was also the need to have trackable metadata and ebook editions of those books, leading Bowker to explore fulfilling this need in some way.
“It was serendipitous that all of this sort of happened at the same time. We had talked to Vook a while back, when we started to look for partners,” explained Barblan. “Vook was one of the companies that we saw that produced good quality, like DCL, which produced large volumes of very complex material.
“We did ask ourselves if we were doing the same thing with both partners, and we don’t think that we are. At the same time, we want to remain a neutral party and we want to tell people about their options and find a good compliment. There will be people who want to take their ebook file and do the rest, and others want to say, ‘Here is my book, you do the rest.'”
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.
