WSJ’s Mossberg Reviews Indigo’s ShortCovers
Walt Mossberg looked at Scrollmotion and Shortcovers in his column today. He shared some new information about Shortcovers.
Books will be between $10-20 USD. If you want to buy by-the-chapter it will be 99 cents each. I assume they will use some kind of calculus to balance the parts versus the whole while remaining competitive with Audible and The Kindle store. (Total numbers of chapters – 1) X 0.99 = Price – Discount
At launch they will have about 50,000 titles — the same number you would find in a smallish bigbox suburban store — but 35% of those will be public domain. That means they have enough new books to fit in a mall GAP store — bigger than a Coles but smaller than a Chapters. 30,000 new titles from six big publishers (5,000 titles per house) is decent representation. No mention if the interface can handle illustrations and if those titles would cost more. They will most likely skip on titles from Scholastic and make up the difference with Wiley/Pearson/McGraw Hill. Needless to say it will be interesting to see what their selection is like.
They are also launching with 150,000 additional samples and excerpts. These are free. Most publishers offer free chapters on their own websites so no surprises there.
Mossberg says Shortcovers is ambitious. “It emphasizes community features such as rating, tagging and sharing. It even allows people to make “mixes” of their favorite works and to upload their own writing.” That touches on the filtering problem with this kind of concept — how do you know what is good? Either the Shortcovers interface designers will hit it out of the park and users will rabidly consume and share or these tools will be dead on the page. The fact that Mossberg didn’t coo about the interface leads me to believe the social elements likely need more work. Uploading your writing sounds promising, but of course I can look at all my own writing on my iPhone already, so we will see what they do with that idea.
Update: the Shortcovers blog has got Mossberg on video
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