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New Unglue.it feature: Add to Readmill

Posted by gluejar on September 27, 2012 in site functionality

When you help to unglue a book, you also help to make it available in an open format: DRM-free EPUB. One reason that’s important is that openness makes the book more valuable to everybody. You can do the things that you expect to be able to do with real books- highlight and clip passages, read privately, read untethered to the internet. You can do the things you expect to be able to do with digital stuff- search and analyze, link and reformat. But there’s a whole world of new things that we’ll be able to do when our book collections are DRM-free and open. We’ll need tools to do those things. Connections to social networks, for example. Full-featured book editing environments, for another.

ImageThe Unglue.it team gets excited when we see people starting to crack open the possibilities inherent in open, DRM-free ebooks. And that’s what Readmill is trying to do. So when Henrik at Readmill asked us if we might implement their “Send To Readmill” button, we put 2 and 2 together and made 5. If you go to the homepage for one of our “unglued” books, such as Oral Literature in Africa, and click on the “Download” button, you’ll see a “Send To Readmill” button after the list of download types. When you click the button, Readmill syncs the ebook automatically into your Readmill library, which is synced automatically onto your Readmill App on your iPad. We also enabled Send To Readmill for the Project Gutenberg titles in our database, such as The Hunting of the Snark.

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So if you haven’t tried Readmill, yet, go try it. Maybe you’ll get some great ideas of new ways to use unglued books. Sometimes the biggest innovations aren’t technical, they’re social.

You may notice lots of little improvements in Unglue.it as we start moving the stuff we’ve been working on for the last month or so into production in preparation for our relaunch. We’re planning out the schedule for that now. Become a registered ungluer now to be one of the first to know the details.

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Update on Unglue.it Relaunch

Posted by gluejar on September 13, 2012 in payments

As we get over our excitement about the release of our first unglued ebook, Oral Literature in Africa, we’re beginning our planning for relaunch.

The silver lining behind our Amazon Payments thunderstorm is that over the past year, some new payments alternatives have emerged. We got red-carpet treatment from three California payments startups, each of them awesome in their own way, each of them a step up from Paypal or Amazon Payments. We’ve chosen one of them to try first, and we’re well along on the way towards implementation in unglue.it. And best of all, the company’s CEO is strongly behind us, so there won’t be the agonizing uncertainty around business approval that we had with Paypal, or the rug-under-pulling we experienced with Amazon.

If all goes well, we’ll be running campaigns before the month is out. So create an unglue.it account and you’ll be among the first to know about the relaunch when it happens. If you pledged to a campaign before, you’ll be asked to re-pledge- campaigns will have to start from zero.

Thank you for all your supportive comments. These have sustained us through the hiatus, and made us hopeful for Unglue.it’s future.

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Open thread: Amazon forces Unglue.it to Suspend Crowdfunding for Creative Commons eBooks

Posted by unglueit on August 9, 2012 in payments

Amazon Payments has informed us that they will no longer process pledge payments for Unglue.it, forcing us to suspend all active ungluing campaigns. According to a Senior Account Manager at Amazon, Amazon has decided against “boarding fresh crowdfunding accounts at this time”. Amazon has been providing payment services for Unglue.it, as it does for the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

Unglue.it offers a win-win solution to readers, who want to read and share their favorite books conveniently, and rights holders, who want to be rewarded for their work.

The Unglue.it website supports crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for specific, already-published books. When a campaign reaches the goal set by the rights holders, Unglue.it pays them to “unglue” their work. Supporters get a digital edition with a Creative Commons license as specified during the campaign. These licenses make the edition free and legal for everyone to read, copy, and redistribute, worldwide. Everybody benefits.

Amazon has required us to void all pending authorizations. However, this does not affect the Oral Literature in Africa Campaign, which was successful and has been fully funded. That ebook, being produced by Open Book Publishers, is almost ready for release. It will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution license for you to enjoy, use, share, translate, remix.

We are already hard at work to implement a new payment method for Unglue.it, and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s available. Until then, the best way for you to express your support is to register as an ungluer, urge your friends to register as ungluers, and let us know which books you want to unglue by making a wishlist. The more ungluers we have, the more rights holders will join us for our re-launch. We’re also looking forward to hearing from you here, on our Facebook page, or on Twitter with the hashtag #unglueit.

With your continuing support, we will survive these difficulties to unglue many, many books. Maybe someday, billions of people will read unglued books and will look back with amazement on the span of years when Amazon dominated the world of ebooks.

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Let’s talk about money.

Posted by gluejar on July 29, 2012 in gluejar

Unglue.it is the main business activity of Gluejar Inc., which is incorporated as a for-profit entity in the state of New Jersey. The goal of the Unglue.it business is to bring book lovers together to fund Creative Commons licenses for ebooks, which can then be made free to everybody, everywhere. Unglue.it charges a 6% commission on successful ungluing campaigns. We hope that we’ll be able to unglue enough books to make Unglue.it a sustainable business.

We think it’s important to make the business side of Gluejar (and thus Unglue.it) as transparent as possible, so that supporters of unglue.it campaigns will understand what’s being done with the 6%. To that end, we’ll periodically report here on our finances.

We started building Unglue.it, and signing up rights holders last year. For the year 2011, Gluejar had operating income of $1556 (consulting work), and operating expenses of $230,293, for a net operating loss of $228,737. Operating expenses were dominated by payroll expenses of $158,463 and contract work totaling $31,406.

The website opened in preview mode in January, and launched in May. For the first six months of 2012, our income was $1216 and our operating expenses were $145,601. Payroll expenses were $107,740 of that, professional fees (legal and accounting) were $12,812. The net operating loss was $144,385.

Obviously, we have a long way to go to make this a sustainable effort. We’ll need to unglue $6.3 million worth of books to recoup our operating loss-to-date.

Gluejar is funding this effort from the proceeds of selling its previous business, Openly Informatics, to OCLC. It’s likely that we’ll need to seek outside funding to get us to the break-even point, but for now we’re trying to go as long as possible without so that we can keep the mission of ungluing as many books as we possibly can at the focus of all our effort.

For those of you who worry about Unglue.it’s ability to reach that break-even point, it’s important to note once a book is unglued it remains unglued- neither Gluejar nor the rights holder can revoke a properly granted Creative Commons license.

For those of you who worry that Unglue.it will amass huge market power and unfairly dominate the funding of the book industry, it’s important to note that we’ll have some of whatever it is you’re having.

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Unglue.it adds language filtering

Posted by gluejar on July 23, 2012 in site functionality

We’ve just added a new feature to Unglue.it: language filtering. For example, you can now see our most-wished books in French, Spanish, German, Greek, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, and Czech. If you’re a registered ungluer, you can add more!

Some notes:

  1. Unglue.it uses Google Books as its book search engine. This allows us to focus on developing non-search functionality for the unglue.it website. But it also limits us to a certain extent. We can’t offer all the discovery features you might want, for example. We do try to offer ways for people with common interests to join together to unglue the books they love. The language filtering is just a small first step towards that goal.
  2. When a book is unglued, it’s unglued for the whole world. But translated works can have complicated rights attached to them. For example, the German version of “Fight Club”  by Chuck Palahniuk has 3 wishers. To offer this book for ungluing, a rights holder would need to have global agreements with both the author and the translator. The scourge of regional rights carve-ups can make this difficult. In other cases, a book that’s in the public domain in its native language may have a translation still under copyright.
  3. As you can see from the ‘Fight Club’ page, we have some bug-fixes to do; summaries on Unglue.it come from OpenLibrary, but we seem to have issues with unicode text. Oh boy, bugs to fix.
  4. We’ve had lots of interest in Unglue.it from around the world. Over the last two weeks, we’ve been featured in 4 different radio programs in Germany, and we experienced strong interest from Russia just after launch. The largest number of non-English ungluing wishes are for French-language works. We realize there are many other things we need to do to make Unglue.it work everywhere (international-friendly payments, for example). Sometimes it seems as if there’s an infinite amount work to do.
  5. Üttish is not a real language. But Google Books tells us that some works have language code “ut” and we don’t know what that means. The books coded that way are in many different languages. So we thought it would be fun to invent a language to match the code. Üts of the world unite!
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