Fatbrain Launches Consumer-Oriented Online Publishing Firm

Business bookstore and secure digital publishing company Fatbrain.com launched a subsidiary called
MightyWords to address mass market
opportunities created by its eMatter digital publishing initiative.


The new company separates Fatbrain’s consumer digital publishing initiative
from
its core B2B operation, where the company said it plans to sharpen its focus.
B2B operations account for a majority percentage of Fatbrain revenues.


Fatbrain.com will continue to leverage eMatter to deliver document publishing
services for its corporate customers. The company said it is currently
seeking private equity funding for MightyWords, which will be operated as a
subsidiary.


Chris MacAskill, chief executive officer of Fatbrain.com, also will serve as chief executive officer of the new
MightyWords subsidiary.


“We’re aggressively building on our business-to-business offering to
capitalize on the expanding market for outsourced document management
services,” MacAskill said. “At the same time, it became immediately apparent
when we introduced the eMatter digital publishing initiative last fall that
we had hit on another exciting business opportunity. The creation of the
MightyWords subsidiary allows us to take advantage of both.”


The MightyWords marketplace site is designed to let authors, professionals,
academics and enthusiasts publish and sell their works to the world, earning
at least 50 percent
royalties on every copy sold.


Works from more than 5,000 authors are available at launch, including Arthur
C. Clarke and Toni Morrison. Once a reader has identified the work they wish
to purchase, the reader pays with a credit card; the eMatter document is
delivered digitally in PDF format to the reader’s computer, where it may be
read on screen or easily printed.


MightyWords’ digital rights technology securely matches the document to the
reader’s computer, rendering it inaccessible on any other machine. If the
reader e-mails
eMatter to a colleague as an attachment, the colleague will be unable to open
the attachment until paying for the eMatter document.


Fatbrain provides
businesses with a Web-based solution for information exchange by combining
its professional bookstore with print-on-demand capabilities and eMatter, a
customized implementation of its secure digital publishing solution.

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