Slow but Sure at Publishing Online

Small, low-overhead, independent e-publishing services continue to enter the budding e-book market, offering small p-book publishers an opportunity to circulate titles in digital form.

Publishing Online (www.publishingonline.com) is an online retailer and distributor offering a variety of fiction and nonfiction titles in the PDF format. The firm was founded three years ago by Paul Knight, a University of Washington professor, in an effort to provide an alternative channel to traditional publishing, said David Humphrey, director of content acquisition. Publishing Online soon needed financing and was acquired by Hong Tan, a Seattle real estate developer who is interested in expanding the company's mission to disseminate quality literature internationally.

The online retailer/distributor offers about 3,000 titles from nearly 100 publishers, as well as downloadable music in the Mp3 format. Titles can be read using Adobe Acrobat Reader and the company is negotiating to offer other e-book formats. "We're an online retailer that does some distribution. We acquire content and offer some limited distribution through Lightning Source," explained Humphrey, who previously worked at Bookpeople, Crossing Press and Turtle Press. "We want to be a destination site for literary and general consumer content," he added. Publishing Online e-books are installed with Adobe's PDF Merchant, a DRM application that prevents the books from being copied or transferred by e-mail. Customers who open an account can download their chosen titles to as many as three separate computers. "We encrypt our e-books," said Humphrey. "We want to assuage publisher's copyright concerns without inhibiting consumers." The site is not an original publisher, Humphrey noted.

The site launched a section devoted to e-books on environmental issues in the spring and plans more portals focused on specific subject areas. Titles are promoted through search engines and word of mouth, said Humphrey, with "print ads likely by the end of the year."

"We're growing slowly in a cautious manner," Humphrey said. "We've had judicious funding. We're looking for revenue growth with profits in three or four years. We think e-books have enormous potential." Small publishers, he said, "can move quickly and increase the value of their print material by digitizing it. Big publishers sometimes suffer from analysis paralysis." E-publishing will be driven, he said, by the "price of content and new, easier-to-use technology."

Publishing Online has about 25 employees in seven offices, including Paris, Frankfurt, Seattle and Beijing.