e-warehouse for New Zealand titles just months away

An e-warehouse of hundreds of New Zealand books as a single point of purchase by Booksellers may be only months away.

Martin Taylor of the Digital Forum told The Read last night that: “while this work in progress, we are tantalising close to pulling off a common e-book distribution/ aggregation warehouse that would allow publishers to combine their e-resources.

“This would allow New Zealand booksellers to get a jump ahead in providing New Zealand titles in e-books format to their customers, while at the same time providing an easy to use supply chain for the electronic versions of books.

“We have about 30 publishers working with us on the project and a final plan is to be put to Copyright Licensing Ltd, as project backers, by the end of March. If approved, it would take about two months to build the e-warehouse,” said Martin.

He added that the project was also being discussed with a number of booksellers and there was a “lot of interest in kick starting the e-book industry in this country.”

The e-warehouse project is one of two strings to the “1000 New Zealand Books Project” by which the Digital Forum with the support of CLL hope to have 1000 local titles in e-book format  later in the year.

“We are hoping that this project will be supported by libraries as well as booksellers,” Martin said.

Martin is to be a guest speaker at the Booksellers NZ conference in Auckland on 29 August – see “Your Bookshop Tomorrow” theme for Conference elsewhere in The Read.