Turning news into books: Brasil 247 introduces Library 247

After two years running Brasil 247, the leading political website in Brazil, I've decided that our next business should be to move into e-books. As the readers shift from print to digital media, I thought the same trend would happen in the book industry in Brazil.

By the end of 2012, Amazon.com launched its KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) in Brazil and I was among one of the first to open an account. The second step was to invite our columnists to organize their e-books. We've also selected some public domain books, from classic authors like Fernando Pessoa and Machado de Assis, to be published.

Concerning the software we used to accomplish this, we decided to use Booktype because of the great partnership we have with Sourcefabric. The Brasil 247 website runs on Newscoop, Sourcefabric's open source CMS for news, and we thought our books should have their epub versions on Booktype. We also found that using Booktype was very easy to work with. Besides that, we consider ourselves more than clients of Sourcefabric. We are also friends. 

After that we joined Google Books, to tap into the Android e-readers, and the iBookstore, to be part of the iOS e-readers. Once we were finally among these three Bookstores (Apple, Google and Amazon), we launched our very own "Library 247".

Since then, we've sold many books and some of them we give away for free. We are really happy that we could also become publishers, offering books all over the world. And what is amazing is that we could do this with a very low investment. In the end it's not a money issue, but rather the satisfaction of offering writers the opportunity to publish their books with us.