Interview with Libertary.com

With the traditional publishing world in flux as publishing houses balance the cost of printing and advertising books against their sales numbers, more and more book loving entrepreneurs are finding ways to stay abreast of readers' changing habits and bring the words of authors they admire to the public's attention. To publish means, in its simplest sense, "to make public," and with the advent of online literature, print on demand, e-books, blogging, and social networking, tremendous possibilities are opening up for readers to receive the written word. New venues for authors to connect with their readers seem to be tripling every year. When I heard about the Libertary website and its efforts to keep out of print books and books that are not well supported by their publishers in the public eye, I contacted its founding partners Alice Porter and Kenneth Shear to find out more about the site and its goals. Here is our conversation about Libertary and how authors and book lovers can get involved.

Sheila
How do you describe the mission of your new web business?

Alice
Libertary's mission is to connect more readers with more books and give them new and exciting ways to share and experience books.

Ken
We're readers and we love books. We saw this enormous potential for the Internet to expand readership and enhance the reading experience. I have helped start a couple of businesses, and I've written a book; Alice has decades of editing experience. We know lots of authors who have written great books that haven't ever reached their potential audiences due to existing limits on the business side of publishing. So we both felt it was a great opportunity for creating a business that makes a real contribution by exposing books to readers and helping give books a bigger role in online communities.

Sheila
How will your website make this contribution?

Alice
When readers find their way books on our site, they see pages designed and formatted for easy reading on the web (as opposed to a simple scan or PDF). We provide information about the authors and the printed copies. In some cases, authors have added new material for their Libertary editions. Visitors can navigate easily through our books and even change the text size to one that is most comfortable for them. We are planning a whole range of new ways for people to respond to books and share books with other readers.

For authors, we provide . . .

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