iPublish

» see ipublish.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Time Warner Trade Publishing announced an electronic publishing arm in the summer of 2000 and put out its first titles that September, running somewhere between twenty five and fifty e-books a month. The full consumer site did not open until May 2001. iRead was the store, selling books at forty to sixty percent under the price of their print equivalents in whichever reader format you owned. iLearn was a workshop with message boards and writing courses taught by people inside the industry.

The third section was the one nobody else was running. iWrite took unsolicited manuscripts from anyone, then made the submitters do the first pass on each other. You had to read and rate a set number of other people's work before yours moved, and the pieces that rated highest went to a Time Warner editor who could buy them. Winning paid 24 percent of net revenue up to twenty five thousand dollars and 50 percent above that, with advances reserved for the print editions only. The site held exclusive submission rights for ninety days while it decided.

On 5 December 2001 AOL Time Warner announced it was shutting the unit at the end of the year. Twenty nine people lost their jobs. The imprint had lost roughly thirteen million dollars. Laurence Kirshbaum, who ran Time Warner Trade Publishing, said the company could not jeopardize a thriving print business by carrying a money-losing operation indefinitely, and added that they had probably scaled up too quickly expecting the consumer side to be stronger. Random House had killed its own e-book venture, AtRandom, in the same stretch, and the trade press read the two together as a verdict on the whole format.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the mechanic nobody copied yet ~

Most of what iPublish built was unremarkable for 2001: a storefront with an author lounge attached and a newsletter going out over it. iWrite was not. Making the applicants grade the application pool gets editorial labor out of the people who want editorial attention, and it produces a ranked list for nothing.

The catch is that it produces a list ranked by whatever the applicants reward, which in a writing community is not reliably what an editor would buy. Nine iPublish authors had print books already scheduled when the plug came out, and those nine were honored.

~ reading in the wrong currency ~

In 2001 I was seventeen, on a dial-up line in Ankara, and paying dollars for a book that lived inside a Windows reader was not a thing anyone around me did. iPublish sold in English to customers who needed a PC and an international card before they could be customers at all, which in Turkey that year was a narrow group that did not overlap much with people who read for fun. What I recognize from this distance is the submission system rather than the bookstore, running a decade before crowd ranking became the default way to sort anything.

~ where the domain pointed ~

The last working capture of the home page is 30 November 2001, 4,525 bytes, titled simply iPublish. By 24 January 2002 the domain was a redirect into twbookmark.com, the home of Warner Books and Little, Brown, and the page it landed on had no mention of iPublish anywhere in it. That redirect was still running in December 2003. Underneath it the bare domain answered 404 for two solid years, so for most of that time the venture had a forwarding address and no building. Steve Baldwin's Museum of E-Failure kept five screenshots of it, which is more than the archive has of the ending.

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