In response to my two-part article on “art object first editions,” I received some interesting comments. As a sort of conclusion to my series, I’d like to highlight Aaron Davidson’s observation about the use of digital dissemination to encourage low-overhead sales. I’ll let him explain:

“The way you monetize digital sales is to create an audience that appreciates your product—then lead them to a non-traditional outpost where you control the price (and the majority of the revenue). That means not Amazon. This is why Scribd and MagCloud jumped out at me lately.

“Scribd is an eBook publisher that lets anyone publish anything. You set the price and keep 80% of the revenue. Magcloud is similar: they print your “zine” to order, meaning there’s a one time set up fee, then you set the price (on top of their printing costs, which is all they keep). The best part is they only print copies when someone orders your zine, keeping your mom’s basement/the dump free of unwanted bulk copies of whatever you’re printing.

“When I talk to people in publishing, it confuses the fuck out of me that they don’t leap all over e-publishing. They are submitting gorgeous and meticulously crafted PDF’s to far-away printers, anyway.

“Without the printing/natural resources overhead, the cost per unit is negligible, which means the price can (and should) be lower. I’m not proposing we give up on cherishing physical things. I’m saying we admit it’s possible to cherish a well-designed digital copy of something. It’s certainly easier to share, cheaper to obtain and create, and more accessible as an entry point for people who might not have the wherewithal to buy books with $20 cover prices.”

I’d heard of both Scribd and Magcloud, but I hadn’t looked into them deeply until Aaron mentioned them. Because of the variety and quality of our printed material, Magcloud is not necessarily a valuable resource. If we were a 70-page glossy magazine, I might claim otherwise. Scribd, on the other hand, is more interesting. They are quite simply a vector for uploading PDFs so that people can read them. Though documents are for sale through the site, the lion’s share is available free. The top bar of each PDF allows you to share the document via email or any number of social networks. Because they have no printing capabilities (deliberately), they operate as a near zero-overhead bookseller—a sort of Youtube for books, but with a real business model (If you think that Youtube’s advertising business model is worth any more than half a billion dollars debt annually, peruse Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker).

As a publisher, it seems unwise not to utilize this resource. We at Flatmancrooked could host digital versions of the books we publish at our own site, but our network is limited to those people who regularly visit our page. On the other hand, placing manuscripts on Scribd increases our base network exponentially (at least theoretically). Even if we didn’t charge users to view a PDF on Scribd, we could help our own cause by disseminating both our name and our content to a wider readership.

We don’t balk at any profit-generating resource, no matter how small. But to use Scribd simply for the purpose of selling a couple hundred digital copies of a book (say we sold them for $5 rather than giving them away) seems shortsighted. A better model might be to employ the Scribd platform as a marketing tool. At Scribd you could go and view one of our “gorgeous and meticulously crafted PDFs,” to quote Aaron, that we, in turn, sell a hard copy of on our site. Imagine that this winter Flatmancrooked puts out a small run of a hyper-designed novel—think Damien Hirst’s edition of Snowblind—which we sell direct from www.flatmancrooked.com. The book’s cover, for instance, designed by Shepard Fairey, is covered entirely with gold leaf. Each unit goes for $100, and we print a total run of 300. In such a scenario, Scribd seems like an ideal venue for hosting a cheap or even free version of that same book. That way we don’t treat Scribd as a revenue source, but as I mentioned earlier, an advertising opportunity: people view the book for free, then come buy it from us.

Scribd is one in a growing number of opportunities for small (and even large) publishers to venture into digital publication. Whether their model is ultimately the most successful is impossible to say. What I can say for certain is that one of these approaches to monetizing electronic content will eventually prove viable. But as always, selling a product requires the conflation of quality and creativity; the venue is largely inconsequential.

Read Part I and Part II

By Kaelan Smith