On TeleRead, Chris Matthews writes about Unglue.it, a new website that uses crowdfunding in order to fund making new and out-of-print titles available for free, without DRM. Matthews read a very
enthusiastic article about Unglue.it at the site BoingBoing, but
when he dug into the story, he found that it was far less positive.
BoingBoing wrote that one of the site's participants, Joseph
Nassise, dropped the funding goal for his book Riverwatch
from $25,000 to $15,000 in order to make the campaign successful.
Matthews learned that the reason he did so was because the campaign
was far below his target, and even after dropping the funding goal on June
12th, he failed to achieve it by the deadline.
The three "active projects" on the site, as of this writing, are at
8%, 1% and 2% of their goals. Only one title, a "classic"
out-of-print title called Oral Literature in Africa, has
made its goal so far, and that's likely because there's still a
strong market in used copies of the book.
The only way that Unglue.it can succeed is if it can attract major
authors who are willing to put titles that have reverted to them
into the public domain for a flat fee. There's very little interest
in paying to put relatively unknown works into the public domain,
especially when some of those works (such as Riverwatch) are
already available as inexpensive eBooks. Most authors would rather
see their out-of-print titles go back into print in order to earn
more royalties.