Entrepreneur Launches Diesel eBooks

by Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 11/8/2004

L. Scott Redford, the founder of a new online e-bookstore called Diesel eBooks, is betting that a combination of low business overhead and low consumer prices will make his venture competitive with established e-book retailers like Amazon.com and Fictionwise.com.

Redford is a former marketing and sales director at Sprint PCS who was laid off. Four months ago, he put his expertise in marketing and mobile technology to work and launched an e-book retail site focusing on romance novels. He quickly decided to relaunch (and rename) the site as a general e-book retailer after deciding he could market and sell e-books effectively in a broad range of categories.

Based in Richmond, Va., Diesel eBooks (www.diesel-ebooks.com) offers 35,000 e-book titles available in MS Reader, Adobe e-book reader and Palm eReader formats. Redford put up all the money to start the business. He told PW the site was launched with the help of "two key working relationships"—e-publishing vendor Lightning Source and Heavy Metal, a Boston-based Web developer experienced in building backend e-commerce infrastructures for selling and downloading digital content.

Diesel eBooks has been designed to be as automated as possible, and Redford claims the site's low overhead gives him an advantage over better capitalized competitors. Indeed, Diesel eBooks' titles are often priced lower than those at Amazon. The site offers 22 fiction categories and 30 nonfiction categories, as well as numerous subcategories, to help consumers find titles easily. Redford is working with companies like Overture to make sure his books show up in keyword searches on Google and other search engines.

Currently, Redford is Diesel eBooks' sole employee, but he expects to hire at least two people in the next 60 days and estimates he'll eventually need five or six employees. "I didn't want a heavy overhead," said Redford, "so I've built this thing to run itself."