Pothi.com Launches free e-book publishing platform with social DRM for authors and publishers

July 13, 2010 - PRLog -- Bangalore: Taking another step towards its mission of making publishing accessible to all, Bangalore based Pothi.com has added e-book publishing and selling to its publishing platform. The platform allows authors to sell e-books starting at Rs. 50/- or even give them away for free as a marketing tool. All the books sold through the store will use Social DRM which will allow tracking of the source in case of piracy.

Publishing through the platform is as simple as creating a word or openoffice file according to the guidelines provided and submitting it online. The platform takes care of generating the e-book files. There are no upfront costs and the authors get 75% of the MRP as royalty on sales from the Pothi.com store. They retain all the rights on the book as well as get full control over the pricing and availability. An online dashboard provides real time statistics of sales and earnings for all their books.

“E-books are gaining momentum all over the world. They represent an excellent opportunity for the authors and publishers to connect directly with the readers. Our aim is to enable them to make best use of the medium without getting overwhelmed with the technicalities”, says Jaya Jha, one of the co-founders of the company.

One of the common concerns regarding e-books is of piracy. To address piracy, a variety of Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions are available from different vendors. DRM typically refers to the technologies which restrict the use of e-book in various ways to prevent piracy. However, existing DRM technologies are incompatible with each other and using DRMed e-books can become a hassle for the genuine buyers.

As an alternative to using vendor specific DRM, Pothi.com is offering social DRM. Social DRM puts no restrictions on the usage of the e-book but embeds some personal information of the buyer in the files. One common example is the name and contact information of the buyer. This discourages people from sharing the files on p2p networks while still giving them full flexibility of copying between their own devices. Thus Social DRM creates a win-win situation for both the parties. When a buyer downloads the purchased e-book from Pothi.com, his e-mail id is stamped in a non-obtrusive way on every page. It discourages piracy while still being convenient to the genuine buyers.

“Since e-books are available for immediate downloads, it is particularly helpful in situations where a reader needs instant access to the book’s content. Many international readers also prefer to buy e-books because they don’t want to wait out the shipping time. We were regularly receiving enquiries from our authors, who wanted to be able to provide e-books to such readers.” explains Abhaya Agarwal, who is also the co-founder of the company.
Further details and the catalog of books already published through the platform are available on Pothi.com’s website http://pothi.com

# # #

About Pothi.com
Pothi.com is India's leading Print on Demand backed self publishing provider. It enables individuals and organizations to publish their books in print, and now as e-books, with no or little upfront investment. It achieves this by technologically enabling various publishing tasks.
Pothi.com is co-founded by Abhaya Agarwal and Jaya Jha, both IIT Kanpur graduates in Computer Science.