Indies Booksellers Launch Caravan Multi-Platform Project

A group of six nonprofit publishers, a book wholesaler, and a variety of bricks-and-mortar retailers are backing a multi-platform book venture, called Caravan Project.

The venture will take books published as hardcovers or paperbacks and make them available simultaneously as ebooks or in audio format. It will also arrange for print versions of the titles to be produced “on demand” — within 12 hours of a reader request.

Release: The project is funded by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and will be headed by University of North Carolina Press. Other participating publishers include Beacon Press, the New Press, the University of California Press, Yale University
Press, and the Council on Foreign Relations Press. The Ingram Book Group will provide content management, fulfillment and other services on the project.

A prototype for each of the five formats will be completed by the summer. In the demonstration phase, about 24 books from the participating publishers will be ready for sale in these simultaneous formats in the spring of 2007.

Meanwhile, in a related story, Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury launched its first 24 digital downloads.

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