Seth Kaufman, Copia Interactive. Copia makes its platform available to people who want to compete with Amazon and Google. They are in 900 campus bookstores and launched a bookstore for Parents magazine. One of the unique things about the platform is that it has enabled marginal annotations that you can share with others. The idea that margins exist and can be shared is a major breakthrough in the history of the book. Added value has worked in the dvd industry for years, but the publishing industry doesn’t think like that. The dvd industry has developed the art of selling the same thing to consumers three or four times. Can do this with a book – put in an ending that was killed by the editor and then annotate it and say why it was dropped?
A book can have layers and layers of content on top of each other. Some examples: author annotations, content “updates,” talk to the author (have the author answer questions for a limited period of time), expert annotations, contests, crowd sourced contributions, inside the book sweepstakes, rewrite the ending. It is a very simple process to add the annotations to books and they can be threaded discussions. Authors have been putting out “new” old books and then annotating them. They system makes it easy to refresh a book that’s been out for a while. They have had good success with the “classics” and having them annotated by professors.
Paul Biba is a retired corporate international lawyer who has worked in 53 countries. Since he is a very fast reader he came to ebooks out of self-defense in order to avoid carrying a suitcase of books on his travels around the world. An early ebook adopter, he has read on Palms, Pocket PCs and practically every device that has been out there. After being a frequent contributor to TeleRead.com, the oldest ebook/epublishing blog on the net, Paul became TeleRead's Editor-in-Chief, a position he recently resigned. Send Paul an email to paulkbiba@gmail.com
