Ungluing eBooks Progress Report: We Have a Name!

Unglue.It will be the name of Gluejar's ungluing ebooks website. Based on feedback from blog readers and many others, we ditched the horrible-in-retrospect "BookPatrons.org", and focused on names that used the "ungluing ebooks" metaphor, which has no baggage and seems to work pretty well. We then polled subscribers to the gluejar mailing list, and twitter followers, who overwhelmingly preferred "unglue.it" over the two other finalists. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

For readers new to this blog, "ungluing ebooks" is what I'm calling the process of raising money to make creative-commons licensed ebook editions of the books that you love, so that everyone, everywhere can read them. You betcha.

The ".it" top level domain shows every indication of being the next ".ly". I recently attended a session of the New York Tech Meetup which featured presentations from startups "want.it" and "knowabout.it". ".it" is the domain for Italy. We'll want to include Italy in the service as soon as possible. I've never been to Italy. Now that I think of it, the president of any company that wants to use a country's top level domain should be required to show up there sometime. Libya and Tuvalu could use the tourism dollars! (Yes, we have unglueit.com, too.)

After Hurricane Irene.

We're developing the Unglue.it website on the Amazon cloud; in addition to the four full time Gluejar staff, we have three design and development contractors working on its construction. It's a great team, but we're still figuring out how to make our virtual office work. Even when Irene knocks out our power.

Our prototype is using the PayPal payment processing infrastructure, various bibliographic web services, and the Django web application framework. Right now, it looks like we'll hit alpha in October.

Many of the development tools we're using are new to me. I'm still trying to understand Github, and I'm enamored of Pivotal Tracker.

One of our big decisions has been to use an invitation-only rights holder strategy during the launch phase. Since dealing with rights holders (authors or publishers) is likely to be our most human-intensive task to begin with, we need to carefully manage the number of rights holders we deal with. We'll launch with a limited number of rights holders, and thus a limited number of works to unglue. If you're an author or publisher interested in ungluing a work that you have rights to, please fill out the form at the Gluejar rights holder contact page, and maybe we'll invite you. After launch, we'll add rights holders based on interest expressed by ungluers (anyone who registers with the site). Ungluers will be able to ask for any published book to be unglued.

It's an exciting and intense period for us, but rewarding in many (non-financial) ways. We hope you'll agree it'll be worth the wait.

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We Need a Name for Our Ungluing Books Service

In 1996, the company I worked for was briefly named "Company B". The day a new name for the company was to be unveiled was really quite exciting. The company that had been AT&T was being split into three pieces. The "A" piece, was to keep the AT&T name and the long-distance phone service. The "C" piece was NCR, which had been acquired a few years before for reasons no one really understood. The "B" piece was going to sell telecommunications equipment and would be centered around our beloved Bell Labs. That's what the "B" stood for.

Nobody was excited by the name "Lucent Technologies" when it was announced. Millions had been spent on a brand consultancy, and more had been spent trying to get Judge Greene to allow the use of "Bell" in the name. And none of us could comprehend that with all that money, they hadn't even bothered to secure the "lucent.com" domain name.


Our management struggled to convince us of the benefits of a meaningless name. They told us the name was an "empty vessel" which meant it would only acquire the meaning that we put into it with our "Bell Labs Innovations". The name had been field tested with focus groups, and nobody hated it. The domain name was acquired.

In late 2005, I needed a name for my company, because I was selling the business along with the name to a non-profit. The company itself was to become an empty shell that would hold money until I had something to do with it. I asked my son for name suggestions and we came up with "Gluejar".

Last year, as Gluejar began serious work on a new business, I back-formed the term "ungluing ebooks" from the company name. I didn't really expect to still be using the term eight months later, but its "empty-vessel" quality has proved to be useful. People have no idea what it means to "unglue" an ebook, so we have the opportunity to fill the word with meaning. The downside, of course, is that we have to explain what it means. "Crowd-funding the relicensing of ebooks with Creative Commons" is a mouthful, and most people don't understand that either!

The language surrounding ebooks can be tricky. "Free" is an immediate turn-off for publishers and authors who want to earn a living from their books; "unlock" suggests breaking DRM, "liberate" suggests that the books were in prison. So we keep on using "unglue".

We've brainstormed a bit about a name for the ungluing-ebooks website we're building. Our working name for the site is "BookPatrons.org". It's a name that  describes with reasonable accuracy the activity that we want to occur on the site, and it has some library flavor to it. From Wikipedia:

Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows to another. In the history of art, arts patronage refers to the support that kings or popes have provided to musicians, painters, and sculptors.

"BookPatrons" is a bit boring, though. Will ordinary people want to think of themselves as "patrons" of books? Does the "pater" root make it seem a bit male? (Will we get competition from "BookMatrons.org"?)

Maybe we should "stick" to Gluejar or some other "unglue" related name. What do you think? This is your chance to be consulted!




If you think that "ungluing books" or "BookPatrons" are really stupid names, please say so now, in the comments. If you think they work well, tell us that too. You can contact us privately, too, with your great ideas.

It can be fun to come up with really awful names, too. My worst effort: "Biblerty.com".

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Unbound wants to be the Kickstarter for Books

... and what they really are is the editor-curated, agent-filtered Gluejar for books that haven't been written.

Ignoring the fact that tomorrow is Memorial Day (and why aren't you Brits out barbecuing anyway?), I feel compelled to write promptly about today's unveiling of Unbound, because many of the words being used to describe Unbound are similar to things I've written about Gluejar.

One of my early attempts to describe our model of "Ungluing eBooks" was that Gluejar would be "like Kickstarter for ten million books". I found that approximately 50% of the subjects tested were mystified by that description, and the other 50% got totally the wrong idea.

So the introduction of Unbound allows me the chance to compare and contrast Unbound, Kickstarter, and GlueJar.

Business model

Unbound is a conventional publisher that asks readers to pre-fund some or all of the fixed cost of producing a book that hasn't been written yet. Unbound tells you how many supporters a book needs, but not how much cash. Unbound doesn't tell you how much money they get or how much the authors get, and once a project is subscribed, Unbound publishes the book, and splits net profits 50/50 with the author.

Kickstarter is not a publisher at all. They just let creators ask for a specific amount of money to support their projects, including projects that might result in the production of a book. Kickstarter takes a 5% fee from funds raised; 100% of subsequent profits from a book go to the creator.

Gluejar won't be a publisher as the term is currently understood.  Gluejar will allow book lovers to pledge support for making books (that already exist) free to the world in a creative-commons licensed ebook edition. Authors retain commercial rights for print and other subsidiary rights. The price is set by the rights holder to match or exceed the income they would expect for future sales of the ebook; Gluejar takes a fee similar to Kickstarter's from funds raised.

Selection Process

Despite their slogan "Books are now in your hands", Unbound is using a selection process that's pretty much identical to how it already works. Book proposals will be carefully curated, and Unbound is only going to deal with submissions coming from literary agents. So if you're Monty Python's Terry Jones, great. I feel so empowered.

Kickstarter also reviews projects rather carefully to ensure quality. But anyone can propose a project, and it's clear from the projects on the site that it's relatively open to newcomers and nobodies with good ideas. It's really the crowd that decides what flies.

Gluejar will allow patrons to pick books for themselves. Although there are a huge number of books out there, you already know which ones you love. We're not sure how to extend the concept to new books or new authors.

Risks

Because Unbound acts as the publisher, supporters have a reasonable assurance that a completed project will actually deliver a book. On the downside, a book that has already been funded might turn out to be less than promised. The incentives encourage the author to split a narrative into multiple volumes, and if a book turns out to be bad, or perhaps just dull, the supporters don't get their money back. I don't know what Unbound means when it says that "All unused credits expire after 30 days."

Kickstarter doesn't do anything to assure that projects get completed. Supporters have to judge for themselves whether the creator is honest and worth supporting.

Gluejar will act as a trusted third party to make sure that good quality, Creative Commons editions are delivered to patrons of a successful pledge campaign. What Gluejar can't guarantee is that a rights holder with all the needed rights for relicensing a particular book will exist. That's why we'll let supporters spread their pledges onto lists of books.

Bottom Line

Unbound has launched with a very nicely done website. They've done a nice job of setting up reward levels and website features matched to book publishing. But Unbound is profoundly timid about putting publishing into the hands of the reader. It's more of a brilliant marketing gimmick than a publishing revolution; they've mapped out a healthy way to pre-sell an ebook for £10.


Thanks to @pablod, @julietalionetti and @muttinmall for a great discussion bringing out some of these issues.

Related articles

• Unbound Launches It's Kickstarter-Byliner Hybrid For Celebrity Authors (techcrunch.com)
• Hay Festival 2011: New site Unbound gives readers the power of publishing (telegraph.co.uk)
• New crowdfunded publishing project signs up major names (guardian.co.uk)

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The Coffee's On, Let's Get to Work

Gluejar is becoming real. I'm pleased to announce the first three hires for Gluejar's new business of "ungluing ebooks".

Amanda Mecke is an expert in literary rights management. Before founding her own literary agency, Amanda was VP, Director of Subsidiary Rights for Bantam Dell, a division of Random House Inc. from 1989-2003, where she led a department that sold international and domestic book rights and pioneered early electronic licenses for subscription databases, CD-ROMs, audiobooks, and ebooks. She was also a co-leader of the Random House/SAP Contracts and Royalties software development team. Prior to joining Bantam Dell, Amanda ran the New York marketing office of the University of California Press. While there she served the board of the American Association of University Presses and was President of Women in Scholarly Publishing. Amanda has been a speaker at the Frankfurt Book Messe Rights Workshop, NYU Summer Publishing Program, American Independent Writers conference, and the International Women’s Writers Guild. She has a B.A. from Pitzer College, Claremont, California and a Ph.D. in English from UCLA.  Amanda will continue to represent original work by her literary agency clients.

Although our founding team will be be playing many roles at once, Amanda will be spending much of her time reaching out to rights-holders and identifying works that will attract financial support from book lovers who want to see the ebooks available for free to anyone, anywhere. Her experience in both trade and academic publishing, together with her keen insight into the world of book rights, stood her above a lot of great people who expressed interest in working for Gluejar. Amanda's Gluejar.com email address is amecke. Contact her with your ideas for books that deserve to be free.

Raymond Yee is a data architect, author, consultant, and teacher.  He is author of the leading book on web mashups, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services (published by Apress and licensed under a Creative Commons license).   At the UC Berkeley School of Information, he taught Mixing and Remixing Information, a course on using APIs to create mashups.  An open data and open government aficionado, he recently co-wrote three influential reports on how the US government can improve its efforts to make data and services available through APIs. Raymond served as the Integration Advisor for the Zotero Project (a widely used open source research tool) and managed the Zotero Commons, a collaboration between George Mason University and the Internet Archive. Raymond has been an invited speaker about web technology at the Library of Congress, Fashion Institute of Technology, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, American Library Association, the Open Education conference, Code4lib, Educause, and NISO. While earning a Ph.D. in biophysics, he taught computer science, philosophy, and personal development to middle and high school students in the Academic Talent Development Program on the Berkeley campus. Raymond is an erstwhile tubaist, admirer of J. S. Bach, and son of industrious Chinese-Canadian restaurateurs.

I've admired Raymond's work for several years now, and the work that he's done is very much is tune with the technical vision I have for an ebook crowd-funding website. The interfaces it will expose to other websites and the data mash-ups it will enable will be just as important as the website itself. Expect that any webpage- book blog, face book page, or library online catalog, will be able to combine book data and user interaction with the effort of nudging the book towards Open Access. Raymond's Gluejar.com email address is rdhyee. Contact him with ideas about how your website can work with ours.

Andromeda Yelton is former Latin teacher and recent library science graduate (with a background in mathematics) who's quickly made a name for herself in the library world.  She has a BA in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, an MA in Classics from Tufts, and recently completed her MLS from Simmons. She blogs at Across Divided Networks and at ALA TechSource, and last year won  the LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award for an article on  A Simple Scheme for Book Classification Using Wikipedia. She was named an ALA Emerging Leader this year.

Andromeda's been mentioned in this blog before. In January, I wrote about her fund-raising to "Buy India a Library". She also has first-hand experience with public broadcasting- she was once a listener contestant on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Andromeda has already started work on a new Gluejar corporate web site. Her Gluejar.com email address is andromeda. Contact her with all your libraryish ideas.

You can follow the Gluejar team on Twitter with a single click at @gluejar/team.

Don't be surprised if my blog post are less frequent- I'll have a lot to keep me busy!

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Open Access eBooks, Part 3. Business Models for Creation

Here's the third section of my draft of a book chapter for a book edited by No Shelf Required's Sue Polanka. I previously posted the introduction; and What does Open Access mean for eBooks subsequent posts will cover Open Access E-Books in Libraries and a Conclusion. Note that while the blog always uses "ebook" as one word, the book will use the hyphenated form, "e-book". The comments on the second section prompted me to make significant revisions, which I have posted.

Business Models for Creation of Open Access E-Books

Any model for e-book publishing must have a business model for recouping the expenses of production: reviewing, editing, formatting, design, etc. In this section, we’ll review methods that can be used to support Open Access e-book publishing.

In 2009 Cory Doctorow put together a collection of short stories called “With a Little Help” and documented the process of publishing it in a series of columns on Publisher’s Weekly. He used a variety of business models to support the project, as detailed below, and the e-book version was released under a Creative Common License.

DIY publishing models

One way to meet the costs of e-book production is to keep those costs close to zero. Free blogging sites have made it simple for authors to produce blogs and other sorts of websites; additional tools are available to add keywords, links, and images. Other tools can convert a blog or similar website to the EPUB e-book format; EPUB export is available in Apple’s Pages word processor and it’s likely that other programs will soon follow suit.

Given these tools, authors can produce e-books on their own, with no other expense than the value of their time. For With a Little Help Doctorow did most of the production himself; as the title suggests, he got friends to help out with things such as cover and book design.

In the “Do It Yourself” or DIY model, there are essentially no expenses to recoup. If the author wants to earn something, additional money needs to be spent on an ISBN and a bit more to get metadata into a feed for Amazon. But if income is not the object, the e-book can simply be posted on a website and made available to the world. A CC license allows the e-books to be distributed in a wide variety of channels.

In fact, with the consent of the editor, this book chapter will be released as a DIY Open Access e-book in EPUB format, with a CC BY-ND license. The author hopes to profit primarily from the experience of doing so.

Freemium models

“Freemium” refers to the business model, common on websites, to offer one level of service for free, and then, when the user is solidly hooked on the use of the service, to offer them a premium level of service for a fee. The difficulty of this model is to have a service that’s attractive enough at the free level of service to drive premium conversions, and at the same time to have the free service be limited enough that upgrades deliver significant value.

In the e-book space, the traditional premium service is typically either the print version or an updated or otherwise enhanced digital edition. O’Reilly has used this model to great effect, by allowing authors to make free PDF versions available on websites while O’Reilly sells print versions through traditional channels.

In Doctorow’s project, he offered Print-on-demand versions through Lulu.com for $18 each, along with 250 “super-limited hardcovers” for $275 each: These were hand-bound on acid-free paper and included original paper “ephemera”, and came with a memory card with the full text of the book and audiobook. The $275 version turned out to be the big moneymaker.

As e-book readers become preferred over print by users, using print as a revenue engine may run out of steam. Bloomsbury Academic is building a platform that also uses e-book versions as the premium. While CC noncommercial versions are available for reading online, the books will also be issued for purchase in print and on Kindle and Sony readers. It’s possible that publishers will look at enhancing e-books with supplementary content or deep semantic mark-up as their revenue driver; a bare-bones Open Access version would serve as promotional vehicles for the core product.

Advertising and promotional models

Cost-free and Open-Access content can promote more than just a premium edition of the same content. E-Book formats are much like HTML web sites in that they can embed links; even javascript functionality is becoming available in e-book content. Publishers can use these types of functionality to generate revenue through advertising. A quick look at iPad or Android App Stores reveals a huge selection of free, advertising-supported Apps, including many apps that simply wrap e-book content.

In one scenario where this might happen, an author of a book series might produce an OA electronic version of the first in the series. The free e-book could have embedded links or “in-app purchase” buttons for subsequent books in the series. OA E-books might also be supported by contextual links and/or product placement; imagine a story featuring a sports car where the brand and model of the car are chosen based on support from a car company.

Another type of promotion that can be furthered by all types of free e-books is personal brand-building. It could be argued that Cory Doctorow’s biggest payoff from the With a Little Help project was that it increased his fame and thus his ability to make money on appearances, commissions, and on the Boing-Boing website. (One story in the collection was a $10,000 commission) Seth Godin

Public funding

Some books, such as those relating to education, public health, political or social advocacy, or scientific research, fulfill a public purpose. Publication of these books using a form of Open Access will further their public purpose. The costs of production and release of these-books can financed by foundations, charities, political action committees, private individuals, or governments.

European governments have joined together to fund the digitization and distribution of cultural heritage works through Europeana. Funded by the European Commission and national ministries of culture, Europeana acts as a portal enabling distribution of large numbers of OA e-books. In the US, books created by the federal government belong by law to the public domain, but there’s no centralized funding of OA e-books or their distribution.

In developing countries, governments seeking to provide textbooks to large numbers of student will eventually find that producing e-textbooks, released for free, is the only scalable method of providing for their national educational needs. Many states in India, for example, already release their state-published textbooks on an OA basis.

A variation on public funding for OA e-books in the context of academic monograph publishing has been proposed by Frances Pinter. Her idea is for libraries to join together in a cooperative, diverting a fraction of their acquisition budgets to fund the fixed costs of producing new monographs by university and commercial scholarly presses, which would then be made Open Access. She estimates that individual libraries could save over 75%, depending on the participation rate.

Another sort of public funding model with a long history of use is the “tip-jar”, or more profitably, the pay-what-you want model. Here, the creator urges his audience to leave some money as a “thank you” in return for value received. Doctorow reported receiving over $1200 using a Paypal-powered donation box, which actually did better than his print-on-demand offering.

Crowd-sourcing

Wikipedia and the more specialized wiki sites it has spawned are excellent examples of Internet resources created by large numbers of individuals working together virtually. These volunteer collaborations have replaced printed encyclopedias for most people, and might be considered to be the largest, most dynamic Open Access e-books in existence. Most users wouldn’t consider these websites to be books, even though the printed equivalents certainly were.

An organization called “Distributed Proofreaders” (DP) is an aggregation of volunteer effort clearly focused on e-books. Many of the digital texts in Project Gutenberg have been produced by DP volunteers who check and correct OCR transcriptions of scanned books. While OCR (optical character recognition) can be very accurate for modern books, books and magazines printed in the nineteenth century and earlier present a variety of challenges. The resulting digitized works are dedicated to the public domain.

Crowd-funding

The model that the author is working on at Gluejar Inc. is crowd funding. It’s analogous to the method that public radio and public television is funded in the U.S., except that every book that’s to be released with a Creative Commons license has a fund drive of its own. Once the producer’s price has been matched by reader pledges, an Open Access e-book is released. The pledge drives are managed by a website.

Authors have used crowd-funding websites such as kickstarter.com to cover the expenses of completing a new book. For example, Mur Lafferty raised over $19,000 from more than 250 backers to fund book design, cover design, and e-book conversion for a fantasy audio series. In a few cases, the projects use Creative Commons licenses. Stephen Duncombe, a Professor at NYU, has been trying to raise $3500 to fund the further production of an open-source version of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which is distributed with a CC BY-SA license. (Of course the underlying work is in the public domain, but the new translations, annotations, and commentary is subject to copyright.)

To get a better idea of how crowd-funding might scale to large numbers of books, consider the author of a romance series. Rights for the earliest books in the series have reverted to her, but there’s no cash to convert the book to e-book formats. She contacts the pledge-drive website, and enters an offer to release the first book under a Creative Commons license in exchange for a lump sum payment that she considers to be fair and which covers the conversion to e-book. Fans of the series can then go to the site and pledge support. If the author's offer price is met, supporters get billed, and the author gets the payment. The resulting e-book file is sent to all the people who have pledged, and put on a feed for the rest of the world to pick up. Since the e-book is now Creative Commons licensed, it can be redistributed for free.

In another scenario, a reader launches the pledge campaign, perhaps someone who has found the book in a library. The library metadata is pushed to the pledge-drive site and other fans can pledge their support. Eventually, the pledge amount gets big enough to attract notice from rights holders, who can then show up, deliver the e-book, and take the cash off the table and divide it among themselves.

Notes:

1. Cory Doctorow's With a Little Help Project
   
2. Bloomsbury Academic
   
3. Seth Godin's What Matters Now
   
4. Europeana
   
5. Distributed Proofreaders
   
6. Mur Lafferty's Kickstarter Project- The Afterlife Series: Heaven, Hell, Earth, Wasteland, War
   
7. Stephen Duncombe's Open Utopia project on Kickstarter:The Open Utopia: A New Kind of Old Book 

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The Public Broadcasting Model for eBooks

Imagine if Radiolab (my favorite radio show) were a book. It would be a best-seller, probably the kind you might buy at Target. It would sound good on your coffee table, and you'd have a shelf full of your favorite episodes. You'd also be able to get it for free at the library. Now that radio is becoming digital, you might even be able to buy it instantly at Amazon.com, or download it to your iPad from the iBookStore.

It's expensive to create fantastic programs like Radiolab. New York Public Radio, which produces Radiolab, produces other award winning programs and operates three of America top public radio stations, all on an annual budget of  just under 48 million dollars. That works out to $130,854 per day. If you spread that expense over the 19 million potential listeners in the New Yourk Metropolitan area, it works out to 0.69 pennies per day per person.

But it doesn't even cost that much to listen to WNYC or WQXR. Most people pay even less, zero pennies, to be exact. What's more, you can listen to the shows for free on the internet. On your iPad, even. And you don't even have to go to the library.

A relatively small number of us send money to become "members" of the station. The $120 my family contributed turned into a deduction on the tax return I completed yesterday. Most people who listen don't contribute, but they're never referred to as "pirates" or "thieves".

The reason this works anyway is that radio has large fixed costs and infinitesimal marginal costs. If the listenership doubles, the costs stay exactly the same. It's not like book publishing, which spends a lot of money pumping paper through a complex supply chain.

A book can cost a lot to produce, too. An author might devote a whole year to the writing of a book. Let's be generous and say the author deserves $200,000. There's an editor, a graphic designer, maybe an illustrator who also work on the book. Add some management overhead, tax accountants, lawyers, and it's easy to get over $300,000 in fixed costs, and we haven't even started promoting, printing and shipping the book. Many books, of course are produced for much less money. Some authors don't get paid a cent.

But EBOOKS ARE NOT BOOKS. They're just bits, and typically not so many, compared to a radio show. The cost of making a copy is negligible. It needn't cost anything to distribute the ebook. eBook distribution is even cheaper than radio, because you don't have to pay for transmitter power, and you don't have to own a frequency license. It's the monetization machinery that costs money: the ecommerce systems and the DRM. If the producers of ebooks had some way of covering their fixed costs (with profit to make it worth their while), ebooks could work just like free radio. Three million people contributing a dime would do quite nicely. 30,000 contributing $10 would work, too.

A public "bookcasting" system would work somewhat differently from public radio. Audiences and patrons would be assembled around individual books and authors, which would be much more numerous than radio stations. People would be motivated to help make the books they love public by the virtuous cycle of receiving books supported by other public book patrons.

In case you haven't been paying attention, this business model is what I've begun working on as Gluejar, Inc..  The Internet presents an incredible capability for assembling audiences around a common purpose. The business will bring together people to pay for the fixed costs of producing ebooks, reward the best producers with profits, and to make these ebooks public, free to read, free to copy, to everyone, everywhere in the world, using Creative Commons Licensing.

This can work. I can see it now. The pledge drive will take up pages 40-50.

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Gluejar is Hiring

March comes in like a lion.

I've spent the last two months talking to as many people as possible about my ideas for a new business surrounding "ungluing e-books". I've been telling people I would start hiring in March. And here it is, March, and I really need to avoid getting too sucked-in to #hcod bloggery. I hope I haven't pissed-off anyone I'll need to be friends with.

I'll get around to writing some real job descriptions, but that's hard to do when you're creating something new. In a start-up environment, people need to do multiple jobs. They need to be expert at something but they have to also be willing to help fill in the cracks between the team's expertises. A good startup always has a breadth of ambition that exceeds its funding, so people have to stretch. If you hire to match your ambition you not only exceed your funding, you also tend to lose focus and struggle to keep the team on a single page.

Gluejar's funding allows for the hiring about of 4 people (in addition to me). They'll have to be able to build enough of a product and business lift within a year to attract additional funding that can provide scale and gravity. Unfortunately, I need at least 8 different job descriptions.

The one-sentence description of what Gluejar will build is "a website like kickstarter.com, but for 20 million ebooks".

So here's a first pass at describe the talents that I'll be trying to hire.

I'll start by focusing on how to build the product (a marketplace where individuals and institutions can join their purchasing power together to acquire ebooks for the public commons).

Web application engineering talent will be needed. We'll need to build a scalable-ish transactable databases of contributors and content items, be able to collect money from contributors, convert currencies, transport books lists and bibliographic data in and out via API's and do lots of data analysis. It would be nice to have someone who knows what OPDS is. Or be able to tell between an ISBN and a book. The large team of engineers will probably want to do a lot of sprints. That's a code word.

eBook logistics engineering expertise will be needed. We'll need to verify and manipulate ePub, PDF, Mobi files, script the sideloading of them onto consumer devices and platforms, and make distribut happen automagically.

Web and UI design talent will be needed. Our website will need to be oriented towards users who love books and want to support their journeys into the public commons.

Product management expertise will be needed. I'm rather fond of the Pragmatic Marketing approach to this, myself. Which takes a lot of domain expertise. In this case, the domain is ebooks, ebook licensing and the book industry, as well as billing, payments, charitable fund-raising and all sorts of other things. Doing the stuff I stupidly omitted to write a job description for. Oh, and customer support and mailing checks.

Legal expertise will be needed. Gluejar and its product will raise novel licensing, copyright and tax issues, as well as lots of mundane licensing, copyright, tax, and accounting issues. We have to know how all this works internationally, as well. It would be nice if the technical systems we build don't make it impossible to address the legal issues.

Practical IP licensing expertise will be needed. By this, I mean not the writing of licenses, but the tracking down of rights owners around the world and mitigating the complete mess that has been bequeathed on us by the international publishing industry and rights rigamarolaries.

Business development expertise will be needed. We'll need to develop partnerships with charitable organizations to identify and promote the un-gluing of specific content categories for which creative-commons licensing will best serve the public's purpose. We'll also need to work with libraries and non-profit publishers that see the public commons as their best hope for staying relevant in the digital content future.

Finally, and most importantly, Gluejar will need marketing genius. Explaining the value proposition of public content to individuals will require imagination, skillful articulation, and passion. Plus, we may need a better name.

I expect that Gluejar will operate office-lessly in its early phases but will occasionally have good parties. I haven't screwed up the courage to look at what health benefits cost these days. If you're interested in helping me make this happen, please send me e-mail. You can figure out how to do that!

Update 3/3: It's been pointed out to me, clueless as I am, that I need a much better description of what Glujar will do. Here it is (and on the Gluejar Home Page, as well!)

Gluejar is building a place for individuals and institutions to join together to liberate specific ebooks and other types of digital content by paying rightsholders to relicense their works under Creative Commons licenses.

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Co-Founders: Your Idea is Worthless. Show Your Chops!

On an entrepreneur's list I'm on, I recently saw this request from "JT":

My short-term goal is to produce a working prototype this spring to test the concept and to position the company for seed stage funding.  I have already done a lot of the preliminary work to define the product and to shape the business model, yet the project is now at a stage where a lot of the "real" work can begin.

I am looking for someone with the technological chops and the passion for [target market] to help me get this project off the ground.  Ideally, this person will be comfortable with both backend and frontend development, with the usual suspects in his programming tool belt (JAVA, FLEX, PHP, MYSQL, CSS, HTML, etc).

The "how can I find a technical co-founder?" thread seems to come up frequently in places like Hacker News and Quora (look at Finding Co-Founders, Technical Co-Founders, and especially  this one), and there are even "speed dating" events that aim to match technical founders with non-technical entrepreneurs.

As someone who's done a startup from the technical side (and working on another one), my response to the would-be entrepreneur was that he needed to approach the "technical cofounder" issue the same way he would approach an investor. Just as he's looking for someone "with the technological chops" he should be willing and able to show that he has the "chops" to fill one of the other roles in a startup team.

JT's idea- your idea- any idea- is completely worthless from this point of view. Anybody can have good ideas, even great ideas. As a result, ideas, by themselves, are very hard to monetize. The best ideas are also easy to copy, and patents notwithstanding, it's very difficult to own them. But the real reason that ideas don't qualify someone to start a business is that almost every innovative start-up gets it mostly wrong at the start. Successful start-ups frequently go through a "pivot" where they re-align their strategy with learned opportunities. Steve Blank has it right when he describes a start-up as being "an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model".

A strong founding team will have expertise in technology, sales, marketing, fund-raising/finance, and product management. There are others, of course, but let me focus on the skills a strong technical co-founder might look for in the rest of the team.

The chops:

• If you really have sales chops, then you already have a customer ready to sign a check.
• If you have fund-raising chops, then you've already raised a nice pot of money.
• If you really have marketing chops, then you can make the idea sound irresistible, even though it's worth nothing and you'll change it completely six months into the company! 
• Product management chops are more complicated, and some nice posts by Vinicius Vacanti and Kate Ray are relevant there. Being a good product manager means you have hands-on understanding of many issues, including domain expertise and technology. If you really have product management chops, then you should be able to define a minimum viable product that's so simple even you can implement a demo version, or perhaps a first iteration of the product, if you're willing to put some skin into it. It's not that hard.

My guess was that JT fell into the product-manager-founder category, and I urged him to try building something himself. Even if he falls flat on his face, he will have gained knowledge and skills that are sure to help him whatever he does.

I've been thinking about how to build a founding team a lot, because I'm trying to put together a business around the idea of "ungluing ebooks". Past experience tells me that the people are the most important factor in the success or failure of a business, and the stress of starting a new business is only tolerable if you enjoy and respect the people you're doing it with.

I'm doing seed financing myself-I'm putting the "serial" into "serial entrepreneur". I know my technology, so I don't really need a "technical co-founder". The new venture needs someone with some marketing genius- a big barrier to success will be finding ways to communicate what we're doing to laypeople. The business also needs someone with expertise in finance and the book business- we'll need to make sure that book rightsholders will feel comfortable working with us. We'll need legal expertise, with focus on non-profit tax law, intellectual property rights and creative commons licensing. We'll need someone to approach libraries and other non-profits to work with us, particularly during the concept validation phase. And to scale the operation, we'll need a talented operational manager. Ideally, all this complementary expertise will be wrapped up in one or two people in addition to me. And of course, unreasonable optimism is a required trait for anyone involved in the early stages of a startup. If you're interested, please contact me.

So, assuming the "ungluing ebooks" idea is worthless, what are my chops? Well, my Java is a bit rusty, but I know pretty code when I see (or write) it. I know enough to hire people who are better at things than I am. I know my way around bibliographic metadata, which will be important to my project, and I have wide-ranging contacts in the world of libraries. And I got you to read this far, didn't I?

Postscript, 2/5/2011: JT mailed the list to say he'd actually found a technical co-founder, and wouldn't have found him without emailing the list and listening to everyone's advice. Way to go, JT!

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Why does Sarah Palin Charge for eBooks?

A neighbor of mine, a professor at Rutgers, has several published books to his name. A few years ago, the publication costs for one of his books were partially underwritten by an environmental organization, because they thought it was important work which ought to see the light of day, or at least the light of a few libraries.

Digital publishing makes possible new ways for works like my neighbor's to be seen by as many readers as want to read them. Since the cost of making digital copies is almost zero, it makes sense for them to be given out for free once the first copy costs have been paid for, especially if that cost is being borne by an advocacy group.

Which brings me to Sarah Palin, and her big-time new book, America by Heart : Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, published by HarperCollins (a division of Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp). It costs $12.99 for the Kindle version and the same on iBooks, Nook, and Kobo, thanks to agency pricing. If Palin is running for president, as is widely assumed, you'd think that she'd want as many people as possible read the book. So far, sales have been disappointing, but for argument's sake, let's assume that it's a brilliantly persuasive thrill of a read. Why bother charging for the ebook, since it costs almost nothing to make copies?

Well, there's the small matter of the big advance (she got $1.25 million for Going Rogue). It all boils down to money. Most of the people buying the book are probably already political supporters, so writing (or ghost-writing, as the case may be) a book like America at Heart is as much a mechanism to monetize political support as a genuine contribution to our nation's political discourse. For the publisher, a Sarah Palin book is a win-win-win. Not only can the publisher make money if the book turns out to be a blockbuster like Going Rogue, which sold over 2 million copies, but the prestige of a popular figure rubs off on the publisher's brand. And when access to the corridors of power comes along with the advance, how can the publisher lose?

Bill Clinton, speaking to the AAP in March 2009

I don't mean to be partisan; the argument applies equally to Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope; the Obama administration has so far been very friendly to the book publishing industry on its "special issues". And don't think that Bill Clinton would have been speaking at the Association of American Publishers Annual Meeting, as he did last year, if he wasn't also an author with a big deal.

It's surprising that these arrangements don't get more scrutiny. It would be illegal for a politician to accept money into a personal bank account from a big company with major political issues before him, but it's OK for a publishing company to write 7-figure checks as advances to those same politicians if there's a book being written to serve as a fig leaf.

Publishing books has always been a double-edged sword for politicians and advocacy groups; a good book bolsters a cause both financially and intellectually. The publicity tour surrounding a book is as much about publicizing the cause as it is about selling the book. But looking to the future, what sort of digital business models will be most effective for authors whose primary goal is to advance a cause?

While the current business model offers many advantages such as access to a publisher's marketing and distribution channels, the author receives a rather small percentage of the money paid by book purchasers. In 2008, the year he was elected, Barack Obama's books sold about a million copies; he reported income from these of $2.5 million. Most authors get a significantly smaller percentage of sales.

If you've been reading this blog, you probably won't be surprised at the alternative I suggest:  bounty markets for open-access ebooks will be the ideal way to accomplish the twin aims of advocacy and fundraising. By first raising money from core supporters, and then releasing an ebook for free, a cause-oriented author can use the open access ebook to gain new converts.

Perhaps ebook bounty markets will even need to put in safeguards to avoid being misused as a naked money conduit to launder campaign contributions.

A guy can dream, can't he?

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On The Value of Things - at a Garage Sale

The proceeds

I spent this past Friday and Saturday pondering the value of all sorts of things- toys, games, books, furniture, household items, clothing. I had four colors of stickers. Green was one dollar, blue was two, and red was just fifty cents. yellow dots we priced "as marked" which meant more than two dollars. Three dollars seems to be a lot to ask - at a garage sale.

We had a beautiful day on Saturday, and people came non-stop. The timing was great- people are starting to think about the holidays, and we had lots and lots of toys. The sale was a great success for us- about 80% of the stuff we put out disappeared, which is a good thing, because otherwise we'd have to figure out another way to get rid of it all. My colored dot assignments weren't about intrinsic value; it was more about how much we wanted to get rid of a thing.

Putting a price on things also meant that people had to value them. If 50¢ was two much for someone to pay for a kitchen knife, well, that person was unlikely to provide the knife a worthy home. Of course some people felt compelled to bargain, despite the dime-on-the-dollar pricing. So I bargained a bit, and they left happy. Others apologized for the low prices; they left happy, too.

The free items were my favorites. I had a bag of shoes in the garage; originally meant for discard. A gentleman asked if they were for sale, and I said they were free to our good customers. So he tried them on, and he was so happy that they fit. They were old shoes, but Rockports do last a long time.

Another fellow had selected bunch of books including several of my father's old particle physics books. Why my dad, an electronics engineer, had particle physics books, is one story; why I shipped them from Indianapolis to store them in my basement is entirely another. But anyone that interested in particle physics deserved to get those books for free!

Dad said: "Just go to bed!"

Most of the books we were selling were ones that our kids had grown out of. They were a dollar each, half off if you bought more than 10. Chapter books were 25 cents each, though I couldn't bear to part with Mercer Mayer's "Just Go to Bed" at any price and took it off the sale shelves.

One eleven year old gleamed when she found out there were books for sale. Her mom had bought some furniture and was arranging to pick it up later. "You can look at the books when we come back" she said, herding the girl and her 8 year old cousin to the car.

The Librarian from the Black Lagoon

It was dark and the sale was long over when they returned for the furniture. I had already packed the leftover books into my basement. After helping to load the furniture into the car, I told the mom that if the kids wanted to see the left over books, I'd be happy to give them any books they wanted. So the four of us went down to my basement and looked at the books. "Oooh, I want!" said the girl at some age appropriate books. "Ooh look, Shakespeare, Mommy! I want!" The mom and I looked at each other and smiled. The mom's smiles were understandable to any parent; mine were because it was the copy of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" that I had read in high school. The cousin did not go away empty handed. I pushed some "Black Lagoon" books on him.

Reflecting on the joy I experienced in seeing kids excited to get some books, I got a better understanding of why so many librarians love what they do. Imagine if you could do the same thing for lots and lots of kids. It would be like taking that joy and multiplying it by thousands.

Maybe that's why I've been obsessed with "ungluing ebooks".

Personal Note: I believe that in life, when you discern a calling, you need to remove whatever obstacles there may be to answering that call. I hear this call to "unglue" ebooks quite personally and clearly. And also to have a "bounty market" to make it happen ready before Thanksgiving in 2011. You can consider that an announcement. For now, why not celebrate Thanksgiving by taking a book off your shelves and find the person who is meant to read it next?

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Business Idea #4: Ungluing eBooks

It's been a while since I blogged a business idea for Gluejar. There have been at least three reasons for this hiatus.

1. Blogging has been fun. Every article generates a bunch of ideas for me to pursue and I just love exploring new ideas and learning about new things. Not to mention the dialogue with readers which has been very stimulating. I've learned a lot.
2. Since January, I've been working with architects and contractors on an extensive home renovation, which takes up a lot of time and mind share. This work is almost done, so it's time to think about new projects.
3. Previous ideas smoldered and the heat dissipated. Same with a few other opportunities I looked at.

On the other hand, my recent series of articles on acquiring ebooks into the commons has led me to seriously consider making this into a business. The more I consider the possibilities and the details, the more convinced I become that the job is both viable and important. It's been over 2 months, and the hallucination has not worn off.

For your reference, here are the relevant articles:

• A Library Monopsony for Monographic eBook Acquisition?
• Can Libraries Work Together to Acquire eBook Assets?
• Aggregating Deep Discount Readers of eBooks
• Bounty Markets for Open-Access eBooks

The business model for this venture is simple- build, run and promote an ebook bounty market, and charge 5%-ish of closed transactions. The hard part is winning over mass markets of consumers, both individual and institutional. The first step, perhaps the hardest step, is explaining and advocating the concept to people who are only just getting a feel for what ebooks are. "Stealth" is just not going to get that done, so I've decided to be as open as possible about what I'm doing.

So here's a first draft of a home-page pitch/explanation. Let me know what you think.

Unglue Your eBooks!

Have you noticed that your eBooks are stuck inside your proprietary reading device?

Have you noticed that the printed books on your shelves are stuck there, instead of being available on your nifty reading thing?

Have you noticed how hard it is to lend an ebook to someone or to give it to your friends?

Have you noticed that you can't get the ebooks you want through your library?

The problem is glue. Not the kind of glue that binds paper together, but the legal kind that sticks intellectual property to its owners and licensees. Authors need a paycheck so they can devote time and effort to writing books; publishers need income so they can refine those books and make them beautiful. Their problem these days is that the book publishing industry is stuck on an old model of selling individual copies.

Gluejar offers a new way for people who love books to support the people who create books without putting all sorts of licensing glue and restrictions glue on the digital copies. We bring large numbers of book lovers together to financially support the ungluing of the books that they love.

Here's how it works:

1. Decide how much you want to spend on ungluing your books. The amount is totally up to you; but how about 10% of what you normally spend on books?
2. Visit our partner sites to decide which books you want to support; you can pledge support for any number of books! Or browse our catalog of books on offer.
3. You can visit your Gluejar Boookshelf at any time to see the current support level for each of your books.
4. We won't charge your credit card until supporters have pledged enough money so that rights holders agree to unglue the ebooks you want.
5. When an ebook is unglued it will appear automatically in your favorite ebook reader account. Once that happens, you can give the ebook to all of your friends and your library can make it available to all of its patrons. 100% legal, anywhere.
6. Many ebooks come with bonuses for supporters; you might win a dinner with the author, a signed print copy, or maybe just a simple thank you note. We'll email you with details.

As you can see, I've tied the name of the service into the pre-existing Gluejar name for now; at least it's not horrible.

If you want to suggest an alternative pitch, put it in the comments. The best suggestion will win $100 to spend on the Gluejar ebook bounty market!

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