Startup idea: Turnkey self-publishing service for authors | Hacker News Reader

Startup idea: Turnkey self-publishing service for authors

jasoncrawford.org

12 pointsjasoncrawford16 comments

Does anyone know about any ebook selling platforms that offer digital watermarking that uses steganography? i.e. to detect who has pirated your materials, via a secret message that dox'es the original purchaser.

I see no platform that will take your text (or PDF) and offer good watermarking. Or, for that matter, any watermarking besides a name and email on every page.

Name and email is easily defeated, because this is easily stripped.

A successful system would be a multi-pronged, steganographic watermark approach. The approach would, unfortunately, rely upon security by obscurity.

Whitespace approaches are good, but can be defeated by pdf2text followed by PDF creation. Nonetheless, they form a decent prong.

Additionally, there is a language-model (NLP) based approach based upon synonym substitution. Some common words can be replaced with synonyms without significantly altering the meaning of the text. So if word A has 8 replacements, I just added three bits to my secret message, the watermark. (I can't find the citation, sorry. If there is sufficient interest, I can dig it up. Or email me.)

Additionally, these approaches can be improved by adding error correction, in case there are minor modifications to the PDF.

As I said, these approaches are a weak form of security, but current approaches offer no security.

Exercise for the reader: If you can identify the pirate of your book, does this really matter? You can at best shame the pirate, but not undo their damage (widespread piracy), is my current understanding. Unless your technology is so good that, like Google with SEOs, people are sufficiently aware of your excellence that they are scared to even dare to try to beat you. Discuss.

Watermarking media can't be an answer to piracy. We already had the discussion with music years ago. Imagine, you loose your external harddrive with tons of your legally purchased media on it (all watermarked)—the founder makes a huge torrent of your media and puts it on Bittorrent for two years. What would you do then?

Watermarking could be a great way to protect IP but just this use case shows its vulnerability.

This is basically what we've done with Leanpub, except we're entirely focused on ebooks. There's zero cost to use Leanpub; you write in Markdown on your computer, we sync with Dropbox and we generate PDF, ePub and MOBI with one click. The author gets 90% - 50 cent royalty. The only part that isn't turnkey right now is automated export to Kindle store and iBookstore, but we're working on that. (Right now you need to submit the Leanpub MOBI and ePub files yourself.) The cost to write a book should just be opportunity cost: an author shouldn't have to spend anything or give up any control in order to reach his or her audience...

I have used leanpub for this short thing[1] and recommend them heartily.

[1] http://leanpub.com/learn-python

How/do you handle royalties on the iBooks and Amazon sales?

Currently you submit your Leanpub EPUB or MOBI file yourself to those stores and we earn $0. You can also put the Leanpub PDF on Lulu to make a print book (we earn $0 in that case too). Once we launch our automated Apple and Amazon submit feature it will be a flat fee to use, and we will still fully support you submitting yourself with us earning $0. We only try to make money when we add value, not lock in etc -- it's your book, you own it.

This has been available in form of CreateSpace, Lulu, FastPencil etc in USA for quite a long time. My own company, pothi.com provides a similar platform to Indian authors and to outside authors targeting Indian market.

I personally believe that future of a lot of traditional publishing companies is going to be of a curator working on top of such platforms. Even today many publishers depend on book packaging companies that take in the manuscript or even an outline and deliver the ready-to-print book.

I run a Literature in translation publishing company built on top of Ingram's Lighting Source. I also am deal with publishing issues at Los Angeles Review of Books. Few authors have any desire to self publish. The barrier to entry to write is so low there is tons of crap.

Look, what would be useful is new author discovery tools. Or anything that helps find talent. Or tools for independent publishers who are not tech savvy. Non cryptic book sales analytics. Easy to use EDI systems.

Where would one get access to book sales data? It seems amazon owns all that data so its hard to get to personal sales numbers to make them easier to use.

Or are you talkign about data from bowker.com ?

For independent publishers something as simple as tying their print sales together with digital sales. This is already pretty simple, but it needs to be stupid simple. You can guess your Amazon sales data pretty easily.

Bowker.com is alright, but it is difficult to compare say English translations of Spanish Experimental Prose Novellas to see if you are competitive in the market. You would be suprised how little independent publishers know about their competitive positions.

I'm building the other part of the equation, ie how to find and hire great editors and artists. Would you be interested in doing a skype call sometime?

I think if we can work together somehow we might be seriously able to make self publishing easier and Still facilitate high quality editing and art work.

I sent an email to Peter already and I'll send you an email tomorrow when I get up. Gnat. My email s in my profile.

There seems to be a growing number of people using 99designs for cover designs.

Are thinking more along the lines of matching up illustrators/artists to authors for art inside the books?

99designs has a lot of problems. The competition aspect is the main one. IT seems to draw the less experienced artists or ones looking for work. If 6 artists apply and do work for a competition, only one gets paid. I have seen lots blog posts from artists who dislike this.

I'd like to bring out the more experienced ones, with a deeper portfolio who are looking to build their reputations rather than do quick designs for someone.

How are you looking for Editors? I know plenty of underemployed editors. Many with years of experience. Do you pay market rates?

They build their own reputation on the site and authors can inquire to editors on the site about rates.

The site is not launched yet - I'm in private beta and will probably be there for a while.

I'd love to interview these editors and get their feedback on my site.

You can email me at railsnoob at yahoo dot com if you'd like to talk further. Thanks.

I have some ideas along these lines with LiberWriter, but I'm pretty happy keeping it fairly niche.

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