McIlroy--Seybold Announcements Were Aplenty

The new "product" Fatbrain announced at Seybold is called eMatter. With eMatter, Fatbrain will accept written material of any length—a page, five pages, a thousand pages—and make it available electronically (in PDF format), or on a print-on-demand basis, to anyone who visits the company's site. The author gets to set the retail price, and the proceeds are then shared 50-50 with Fatbrain. What Fatbrain is doing is breaking through the paradigm that a saleable print commodity must be a newspaper, a magazine or a book.