The Egatz Epitaph

The Egatz Epitaph has been accused of being a Barnes & Noble-bashing platform. We call them as we see them, albeit with a healthy dose of commentary you won’t find elsewhere. Here’s a story for the unbelievers.

In Barnes & Noble’s smartest move since Len Riggio duplicated the super store concept of the original Fifth Avenue location he purchased in 1971, Barnes & Noble announced they will be taking on Apple’s iBookstore with PubIt!.

PubIt!, despite the moronic name, misspelled typemark, and exclamation point, will address iBookstore’s most exciting, virtually non-promoted, and grossly underreported feature: the ability of hacks everywhere to publish their own eBook.

With potential hordes of bad writers uploading their material as eBooks, things can shake up the publishing industry, an industry already feeling its way into the 21st Century like Helen Keller dropped off in Death Valley.

Unlike Apple’s straight grab of 30% of the cover price, Barnes & Noble has announced a different profit sharing breakdown with potential authors. They’ll take 35% of the price of eBooks under $10, and a stupefying 60% of titles priced over $10. How’s that for Riggio-math?

Despite this greedy, punitive, and impossible-to-justify policy, Barnes & Noble stands poised to launch a venture which can be highly profitable, and possibly saved their ill-conceived Nook eReader from total obscurity.

Promising the ability to turn anyone’s HTML, TXT, RTF or Word file into the .epub format, PubIt! will enable writers to get their screeds up on the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. This is exactly what Apple had promised with their iBookstore and the iBooks app, although they have completely fallen down on promotion efforts to publicize this functionality. Whomever is running this division for Apple should be swiftly removed and retrained to work as a greeter an as-yet unbuilt Apple Store in Fairbanks, Alaska.

As Cupertino continues their bizarre slumber on promoting iBooks and iBookstore, Barnes & Noble might do something correct for the first time in decades, and likely for the first time since they’ve entered the world in digital media. Kudos to Lenny and the folks responsible for PubIt!. You may have found the way to save that once-great book retailer, Barnes & Noble.