"Jane Friedman and Jeffrey Sharp unveiled their Open Road duo act to the crowd at Mediabistro's eBook Summit Tuesday morning in New York. Two days after a page-one story in the New York Times about Random chief executive Markus Dohle's pre-emptive letter to agents reiterating Random's claim to "book rights" including ebook rights for authors like the late William Styron, Friedman held her ground, asserting that Styron was a "perfect example" of the "author-branded backlist" tranche of the Open Road "layer cake".
"The "cake" will also include "publisher partnership niches" – Open Road working with houses like Kensington and Grove Atlantic – and "e-riginals" – that will include a "curated" self-publishing element (although right now, self-publishing is "our least well-thought-out component," Friedman allowed).
Friedman says:She said that Open Road would start publishing in March, and by the end of 2010 would have published 750-1,000 ebooks, of which 20 would be e-riginals. The second year the number of originals would double, and would reach 100 "at some point."
The price point for Open Road's ebooks looks to hover around $14 – the price of a typical trade paperback – although it hasn't yet been fixed. Revenue would be split 50-50 with the content owner. The plan is not to sell books from the site, but to use distributors. "I have never worked this hard in my life," Friedman later confessed.
"The Art of Disruption" was how the session had been headlined. "We don't have to live by the rules," Sharp intoned. "We're going back to the future," Friedman added, the second phrase of the mantra.
The man who helped make movies like Boys Don't Cry and You Can Count on Me, and the woman who spent previous lives at Knopf and Harper, have in Sharp's words set out to occupy "the interstitial space between the page and the big screen," with the ebook the "center of the universe" and a lot of video content "living on top of it".
Thus the Styron as a case in point: Open Road wants to recall his oeuvre to life not just through the texts of novels like Sophie's Choice and his groundbreaking memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, but through "mini-documentaries" and "premium content" that would make use of archival video and archival documents from Styron's papers at Duke University, and perhaps even use some kind of "augmented reality" enabling readers to "visit" the sites of a novel via a GPS-like application.
It has signed an agreement with Styron's estate. But, after Dohle's letter, Friedman had to admit that "the only area where there might be an issue is in the author-branded backlist", saying that it had only been "somewhat resolved" by the Rosetta Books case in 2001.
Many attendees expressed fear that the "issue" might ultimately end up in the courts, feeling that the first shots have only just been fired. Others even wondered about the size of the potential audience for a project like the Styron. (Although a sudden revival of interest in another southern writer, William Faulkner, who had faded from the scene, was kick-started during Faulkner's lifetime by the publication of the "Viking Portable" anthology).
Nobody disagreed with Friedman when she said "each publisher will have to find his or her way. It will be a tough decade" and went on to add: "the e-world is going to get close to representing 50% of the publishing business."
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