EPIC Publishing Opportunity

[Epicenter Epic <epicenter -at- INFONAUTICS -dot- COM>]

Notice to Zine Publishers, Webmasters and Publishers:

On July 23rd, Infonautics Corporation [http://www.infonautics.com] announced
a one million dollar project to help smaller publishers get their data
included in the Electric Library [http://www.elibrary.com]. The purpose of
EPIC, the Electronic Publishing Innovation Campaign, is to provide
publishers, individual authors and photographers the means to digitize and
prepare their works for the online marketplace. EPIC participants will
receive incentives ranging from $1,000 to $50,000, as an advance on
royalties in exchange for the inclusion of their digitized content in the
Electric Library. The Electric Library currently contains content from Index
Stock Photography to U.S. News and World Report, from Roth's Greatest Poems
to Sports Illustrated for Kids. While these are large titles, we are seeking
to add to the library from the entire gamut of quality literature, no matter
how small the circulation, or what the delivery medium is.

One important point to note is that this *IS NOT* an exclusive agreement.
Publishers who are online via other methods are not obligated to be solely
on the Electric Library. In addition, our service will not cannibalize other
online distribution methods because the Electric Library answers questions,
it doesn't find articles. Students enter our database (Electric Library on
Web, or Homework Helper on Prodigy) and  ask questions in plain english such
as, "Who is the best basketball player?"  Our natural language engine
processes the request and returns a list of articles  relevancy-ranked to
answer the question. From this list of articles, users pull up the articles
that they are interested in. Publications on the web can have a link added
within articles to their website to bring traffic, but the actual articles
are served from our system.

As you may know, our service is subscription-based, so publications on the
Electric Library are only used by paying members or visitors with trial
accounts. We charge users $10 a month for access to the library and from
this revenue we create a royalty pool distributed to publishers, based on
their percentage of total hits to their material. In addition, you can
participate in a bounty program where you would receive a bounty for every
time a person visits our site from your link and becomes a member.

From this, I hope you can see that we offer a variety of ways for publishers
to earn a steady stream of revenue from their quality content. In addition,
you don't endanger your investment in your website or other online
distribution mediums. Sounds too good to be true? Well, almost. In order for
us to add your material to our service it must be in a format we developed
called UPF (Universal Publisher Format). While many types of content can be
easily filtered into UPF, it can take time and money, which is prohibitive
for many small publishers. We have started the EPIC Program to help
alleviate this problem. We will give awards to publishers who work to
translate their material into UPF. In addition, we will provide consulting
services to EPIC recipients as well as discounts (through our partner
Innodata) for text-only publishers who wish to have their material digitized.

If you are interested in joining the Electric Library and the EPIC program,
we encourage you to visit our website at http://www.infonautics.com/epic/
and apply on-line, or send email to epicenter -at- infonautics -dot- com -dot- 

Thank you for your time,

EPIC Team

                  TECHWR-L List Information
To send a message about technical communication to 2500+ list readers,
E-mail to TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU -dot-  Send administrative commands
         ALL other questions or problems concerning the list
       should go to the listowner, Eric Ray, at ejray -at- ionet -dot- net -dot-