A few young book-lovers in British Columbia are trying to save the publishing industry by putting more books up online. But this isn’t a den of pirates, or another e-book scheme.
Julie Morris is part of the team that worked to launch Bookriff.com in the fall of 2008.
At BookRiff, users will be invited to grab chapters from different books, articles from magazines or websites, artwork and other content, and mash them together into a customized book, which will be printed on paper and mailed to the creator.
Mark Scott, president of Douglas & McIntyre, founded BookRiff to present the notion that “copyright protection doesn’t have to be abandoned in pursuit of new and innovative publishing tools,” according to Morris. She went from being an intern at D&M, to being part of the BookRiff team in the fall of 2008.
“Having my hands in both has given me the unique perspective of someone who is both confronted with the massive amount of change happening in the publishing industry, and a part of that change to a certain degree,” she wrote in an e-mail.
She agreed to answer some questions about BookRiff for the Gazette, in hopes of presenting one possible future for copyrights and user rights in the digital age.
Bethany Horne: How is BookRiff’s idea unique?
Julie Morris: Oh, there are so many answers to this question. It is a truly innovative business model, for one. It highlights the idea that though demands of readers are changing and the web is becoming a dominant medium, print books are still important and valuable. It emphasizes the value of “curated” book content, in contrast with many self-publishing websites, which provide some similar book building tools, but not the ability to build upon published works.
BH: How many books will users be able to grab chunks from when the website launches?
JM: The short answer is that we predict having millions of books available upon launch, plus loads of other material from various sources. The longer answer is that it is really difficult to say exactly, for a variety of reasons. We are talking to a number of book publishers, along with newspapers and magazines, as well as online content providers who are all eager to participate, but because we are in beta development, we are just approaching the point that we’re ready to load content into the system. Secondly, some book publishers may choose to sell their books by the chapter, while others may load whole books for users (and authors) to add supplementary material to. The content will likely come in phases, not all at once upon launch. Riffs will also be able to hold public domain content users find with the web search tool or upload themselves.
BH: How does BookRiff propose to balance the needs of the users versus the rights of the writers and content creators?
JM: BookRiff is an open platform where users can create their own strategies for buying and selling content. The business model is such that the content providers (be they authors, publishers, or individuals) set their own price and receive 100 per cent of the revenues. When the user-created compilations we call “Riffs” are printed, the purchaser pays for the printing costs, along with a set BookRiff fee. BookRiff doesn’t try to impose restrictions on any users or what they can do with the tools the site provides, but at the same time we leave it up to the content owner to determine how (his or her) works can be used.
BH: Has anybody hesitated to let go of control over the package his or her content appears in? Say, authors with no control over the book design, or artists unable to see how their work prints on your printers.
JM: Yes, of course. But this is only natural, right? Any time a tool is developed to enable others to alter the presentation of copyright-protected content in any way, there is an automatic reaction of uncertainty. But in your question you suggest that artists have no control over book design and can’t test print quality. This isn’t true at all. Authors and other artists can always keep their content private and use BookRiff to create their own Riffs, print them to test quality and take down their works if they aren’t satisfied. That said, BookRiff won’t be for everyone, and while the print quality is good, Riffs are not meant to compete with publishers’ high-quality offset-printed bookstore books. Riffs are a different medium. They serve a different purpose for readers.
BH: And they’ll also have no control over the quality of the content they appear next to in a book of riffs.
JM: This is true, but isn’t it also true of e-books and other e-content in e-readers? And also true of web content that is read next to an ad placed on the same page in a browser? Because a Riff is primarily a print concept, it asks people to make a leap in the way they think about books, and examine the possibility that a book can be a device just as an iPhone, Kindle, Nook or web browser is a device. Mark Scott brought this concept of the book as a device to my attention. I think it’s pretty dead-on.
BH: When will BookRiff become available?
JM: We have a release plan that doesn’t include specific dates for the simple reason that BookRiff is being built from the ground up, and as we have learned, software development does not follow a predictable timeline. We have a target for a public beta launch, late this fall, after we open the site up in the coming days to publishers and give them enough time to load their content and test out the tools.
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