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inTouch: BookRiff Allows You to Remix Books
Remember when Choose Your Own Adventure books seemed to be the main way for book lovers to direct their own reading experience? You’ve always had a choice of what to read, but little input as to the direction the story took. People already use MP3 players to build the music collections they want and mix other entertainment options as they wish. In this age of customization, why should books be left out?
BookRiff Media, which offered a sneak peak at BookExpo America in 2009, is set to debut on October 6 and will offer consumers the opportunity to curate content and put together customized books. Outsell noted that “BookRiff Aims to Do for Content What Apple Did For Music.”
In an interview on O’Reilly.com, BookRiff’s CEO Rochelle Grayson defined a Riff as “a remix of chapters from published books, essays, articles, or even one’s own content. The concept behind BookRiff is to create an online platform that allows consumers and publishers to remix and to resell content, while ensuring that all original content owners and contributors get paid.” So while she says the company believes in an open marketplace, they don’t believe that it should be so open that content creators don’t get paid for their work. The company gets 30% of the profit from sales and content owners get 70%, while the recommended commission for curators (or Riffers) is 5%. And as of right now, people will not be able to share their DRM’d (Digital Rights Management) Riffs with others, but that may change.
Interestingly enough, Grayson said that the opportunity to create this kind of curated book project “may change the definition and expectations associated with “ownership.” And the debate over how much ownership one can take over curated book content has already begun because in the comments section, someone has already said the suggested 5% commission rate for Riffers is too low.
As a curator, you can set the policies including pricing, regional licensing rights, and the amount that can be previewed before the Riff is sold. Curators also have the option of “retiring” a Riff and creating a newly edited version, with the option of selling “edits” or “updates” separately to previous purchasers for an incremental price.”
O’Reilly Media is a BookRiff partner and will provide the company with content and in a podcast on O’Reilly.com, Grayson talked about how the company wants to help grow the adult nonfiction market. This would be a welcome tool for putting together books for class and workshops. It would also work well for people who wanted to create their own cookbooks and nonfiction advice books.
Until recently, people made books available in print form before digital form, but now book projects are appearing digitally first or simultaneously. BookRiff is launching first for e-books only and according to Publishers Weekly, print-on-demand books will be available by early 2012.
In the O’Reilly.com interview, Grayson was asked if this is a “golden age for curators” and she replied in the affirmative, adding that “Over the next five years, the amount of published information will increase exponentially. It will become more difficult for readers to assess and to evaluate the quality and the relevance of a growing database of content.” It is her hope that by providing books curated by domain experts, BookRiff can help people find what they want.
It is interesting that BookRiff uses a vocabulary that employs terms often associated with art and music (curator, riff) in the context of books. With digital media, the walls between different methods of storytelling are crumbling. And while BookRiff is aiming for nonfiction readers, I can imagine tripped-out fiction books that combine the elements of different fiction projects.
What kind of remixed books would you like to see?
DEEPER DIVE
Check out Everything is a Remix, the ideas episode
About The Author:
Jada Bradley
Jada Bradley (jadabradley.com) is a Washington DC-based writer and educator who enjoys telling stories in formal and informal ways. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post and online. She holds Masters in Spanish Translation and is a great supporter of creative expression in the various forms it takes. She also writes about local cultural events as D.C. Cultural Events Examiner for Examiner.com. Her blog, In Other Words, can be found at inotherwordz.blogspot.com.
