Byliner.com

Love what this site is doing, longform pieces for immediate download. The Krakauer piece on the Greg Mortenson has more than 20,000 downloads already.

Anyone know more about it?

http://byliner.com/

 

I posted this link on the Mortenson thread:
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/romenesko/128741/byliner-aims-for-the-space-between-books-and-magazines/

The next four byliner.com stories will be by William Vollman, Bob Shacochis, Anthony Swofford and David Rakoff.

 

I've had problems getting the download to open on Firefox.

 

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/46926-how-krakauer-got-onto-the-mortenson-story-and-the-launch-of-byliner-com.html

 

Ich bin ein Byliner.

 

It kept causing my browser to crash, and then when I saved it as a .pdf it kept causing my PDF reader to crash.

Does anyone know if it is or if it will be available for Kindle? Or is it possible to send a .pdf to your Kindle?

I've skimmed it, but I don't want to read 89 pages on my laptop and I also don't want to print it.

 

Az's link answers my question. It will be available for download to Kindle on Wednesday for $2.99.

 

For what it's worth, I had no trouble downloading it using Google Chrome.

 

I didn't have a problem in Firefox. It took me 3 sittings to get through it, but very thorough work. Amazing it somehow took this long for the expose to come.

 

Worked fine in IE.

 

Byliner's going to be publishing short e-books, between 10,000 and 35,000 words. Some of them will be entirely original. Some of them will be modified (extended or footnoted, say) versions of existing work. The Krakauer one was free for a time, but they will be selling them, kind of like on the iTunes model.

The good news for writers is, they're going to pay well—as well as high-end magazines—with royalties on top of advances, like regular books.

In addition to the e-books, the site will have discussions about longform narrative and will also be a repository for longform journalism when it fully launches. They were hoping to have it ready for the 60 Minutes piece, but I think 60 Minutes ran faster than they thought it would.

I have to say, I think the site looks great, and they have quite a line up already. They were courting Susan Orlean on Twitter last night.

Mark Bryant is one of the principal architects. He's a good guy and editor—he was the editor-in-chief for Play, and before that Outside and Men's Journal, I believe.

The idea is that some stories are too long for magazines and too short to publish as books. And publishing them digitally—as was the case with Krakauer's—of course means that you can turn them around far quicker than a regular book. I'm hoping it's a neat little niche they've found, just when there are enough people reading on Kindles and things like that to make it profitable. Like everything else in this business, it's a risk, but I think it's a smart risk. It's a beautiful risk, at least.

 

You didn't get nearly enough props for this.