Newspapers publishing an e-book compilation?

[Jake_Taylor]

The publisher came to me today and asked what it would take to do this. We have an ongoing news story that's taken some strange twists and turns and we've published hundreds of articles, documents, etc. on it. He wants to put it all into e-book form and see if we can sell it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.

I don't really know where to start, but I knew where to ask. :) What do you know SJers?

Thanks for any help.

 

[MonsterLobster]

I've been researching and experimenting with this the last few weeks with some plans in mind.

Your best bets are to either do it as an epub via InDesign or as an iPad/Kindle magazine type thing with something like Mag+, which is also via InDesign.

The ePub, I suppose you could really do it as simply as putting it in a PDF and publishing it that way. But you can do some more interesting things with it pretty simply in InDesign. If you can drop a few dollars on a month's worth of lynda.com, there are a few good courses on there about making epubs and sending them out through iTunes and the Android market, which I've heard can take some time. If you really, really want to do it DIY, you could do this and set up a PayPal account for people to purchase it.

Mag+ is basically an InDesign plug in that allows you to make some pretty slick tablet magainzes and it does all the work for you in terms of pushing it through the iTunes store. The downside is that it requires InDesign CS5 and above (most people seem to still be at CS3) and it costs varying amounts, from something like $300 to $3,000, to actually publish it depending on which licensing plan you purchase.

 

[brandonsneed]

Hey Jake, my wife could probably help you out a lot. She's a marketing coordinator for a company in our town, she is awesome with programs like InDesign—has the whole Adobe CS5 suite and is nothing short of an expert—and she's designed books before. She doesn't have a heck of a lot of experience with e-books yet, but she knows a lot about them and might be able to help you guys out. I know she's pretty busy right now, but if you just drop me a line at [email protected] and let me know what all you guys have in mind, I can ask her if she'd have time.

 

[boundforboston]

Not sure what your resources are, but the Orlando Sentinel did something like this already: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-06-16/sports/os-dwightmare-orlando-sentinel-ebook-0610-20120609_1_e-book-dwight-howard-magic-insider-brian-schmitz. I wonder if Tim would provide some input into the product -- assuming he's not packing for Ft. Lauderdale.

 

[Jake_Taylor]

Thanks for the replies. I'm sure we don't have the resources they had in Orlando, but that is helpful.

 

[SoCalDude]

A few years ago after a Lakers championship, one editor and 2 part-timers found every game story from the season opener through the end of the playoffs, added a few columns, got photos and the box scores and shipped them to a book publisher. Within a couple of days, the book was out.
It seemed ridiculous to me. But I was walking through Costco a week later and saw a stack of them. A few weeks afterward, I asked the editor about it and he said it made the company $50,000. Not bad.